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Multiple vulnerabilities released in NTP

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Re: Multiple vulnerabilities released in NTP

#5

Post by PhantomGremlin »

NTP is one of those old school Internet protocols that was developed in "a more civilized age". The reference implementation "growed like Topsy" in an academic setting. So it's not surprising that it has serious vulnerabilities.

Many years ago OpenBSD threw up their hands and just decided to roll their own, named OpenNTPD. It's not nearly as full featured as the reference implementation, but it works fine for most people.

Edit: forgot to mention that OpenNTPD does privilege separation (don't know if reference implementation has added that yet). Which means that "executed with the privilege level of the ntpd process" isn't nearly as scary as when the process is running as root.

Re: Multiple vulnerabilities released in NTP

#6

Post by VonGuard »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #5

NTP is one of those old school Internet protocols that was developed in "a more civilized age". The reference implementation "growed like Topsy" in an academic setting. So it's not surprising that it has serious vulnerabilities. Many years ago OpenBSD threw up their hands and just decided to roll their own, named OpenNTPD. It's not nearly as full featured as the reference implementation, but it works fine for most pe…

NTP's author, Eric Fair, is actually the son of the founder of Fair-Issac. Very smart cat, but this was all written so, so long ago it was bound to be exploitable sooner or later.

Re: Multiple vulnerabilities released in NTP

#7

Post by voidz »

The ntpd daemon does not run as root. So, how is it able to change the time of the system? Does it use setuid, or caps, or something else?

I wonder because this would also affect what arbitrary code could be run as the ntp user.

Re: Multiple vulnerabilities released in NTP

#8

Post by PhantomGremlin »

VonGuard wrote: post #6
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #5

NTP is one of those old school Internet protocols that was developed in "a more civilized age". The reference implementation "growed like Topsy" in an academic setting. So it's not surprising that it has serious vulnerabilities. Many years ago OpenBSD threw up their hands and just decided to roll their own, named OpenNTPD. It's not nearly as full featured as the reference implementation, but it works fine for most pe…

NTP's author, Eric Fair, is actually the son of the founder of Fair-Issac. Very smart cat, but this was all written so, so long ago it was bound to be exploitable sooner or later.

Totally OT, but it would be amusing (to me at least) if Eric named his son Isaac.
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