CVE-2016-5696 (published 2016-08-06T20:59Z)

net/ipv4/tcp_input.c in the Linux kernel before 4.7 does not properly determine the rate of challenge ACK segments, which makes it easier for remote attackers to hijack TCP sessions via a blind in-window attack.

Severity: MEDIUM
CVSS v2 base score: 5.8 (AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:P)
CVSS v3 base score: 4.8, MEDIUM (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:L)

Weakness information:
cwe_id: CWE-200
cwe_name: Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor
description: The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
extended_description: 
	   There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker.  Some kinds of sensitive information include:
       
         private, personal information, such as personal messages, financial data, health records, geographic location, or contact details
         system status and environment, such as the operating system and installed packages
		 business secrets and intellectual property
		 network status and configuration
		 the product's own code or internal state
         metadata, e.g. logging of connections or message headers
		 indirect information, such as a discrepancy between two internal operations that can be observed by an outsider
       
	    Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected.  These parties include:
               
                  the product's own users
                  people or organizations whose information is created or used by the product, even if they are not direct product users
		  the product's administrators, including the admins of the system(s) and/or networks on which the product operates
                  the developer
               
	    Information exposures can occur in different ways:
               
                  the code explicitly inserts sensitive information into resources or messages that are intentionally made accessible to unauthorized actors, but should not contain the information - i.e., the information should have been "scrubbed" or "sanitized"
                  a different weakness or mistake indirectly inserts the sensitive information into resources, such as a web script error revealing the full system path of the program.
                  the code manages resources that intentionally contain sensitive information, but the resources are unintentionally made accessible to unauthorized actors. In this case, the information exposure is resultant - i.e., a different weakness enabled the access to the information in the first place.
               
	    It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an "information exposure," but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read.  CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.
         
         

Fix information:
repo_url: https://github.com/torvalds/linux
commit_details: repo_url: https://github.com/torvalds/linux
author: Eric Dumazet
author_date: 2016-07-10 10:04:02+02:00
msg: tcp: make challenge acks less predictable

Yue Cao claims that current host rate limiting of challenge ACKS
(RFC 5961) could leak enough information to allow a patient attacker
to hijack TCP sessions. He will soon provide details in an academic
paper.

This patch increases the default limit from 100 to 1000, and adds
some randomization so that the attacker can no longer hijack
sessions without spending a considerable amount of probes.

Based on initial analysis and patch from Linus.

Note that we also have per socket rate limiting, so it is tempting
to remove the host limit in the future.

v2: randomize the count of challenge acks per second, not the period.

Fixes: 282f23c6ee34 ("tcp: implement RFC 5961 3.2")
Reported-by: Yue Cao <ycao009@ucr.edu>
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Cc: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Acked-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Acked-by: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
repository: repo_url: https://github.com/torvalds/linux
repo_name: torvalds/linux
description: Linux kernel source tree
repo_language: C
owner: torvalds
file_changes: filename: tcp_input.c
change_type: ModificationType.MODIFY
diff: @@ -87,7 +87,7 @@ int sysctl_tcp_adv_win_scale __read_mostly = 1;
 EXPORT_SYMBOL(sysctl_tcp_adv_win_scale);
 
 /* rfc5961 challenge ack rate limiting */
-int sysctl_tcp_challenge_ack_limit = 100;
+int sysctl_tcp_challenge_ack_limit = 1000;
 
 int sysctl_tcp_stdurg __read_mostly;
 int sysctl_tcp_rfc1337 __read_mostly;
@@ -3458,7 +3458,7 @@ static void tcp_send_challenge_ack(struct sock *sk, const struct sk_buff *skb)
 	static u32 challenge_timestamp;
 	static unsigned int challenge_count;
 	struct tcp_sock *tp = tcp_sk(sk);
-	u32 now;
+	u32 count, now;
 
 	/* First check our per-socket dupack rate limit. */
 	if (tcp_oow_rate_limited(sock_net(sk), skb,
@@ -3466,13 +3466,18 @@ static void tcp_send_challenge_ack(struct sock *sk, const struct sk_buff *skb)
 				 &tp->last_oow_ack_time))
 		return;
 
-	/* Then check the check host-wide RFC 5961 rate limit. */
+	/* Then check host-wide RFC 5961 rate limit. */
 	now = jiffies / HZ;
 	if (now != challenge_timestamp) {
+		u32 half = (sysctl_tcp_challenge_ack_limit + 1) >> 1;
+
 		challenge_timestamp = now;
-		challenge_count = 0;
+		WRITE_ONCE(challenge_count, half +
+			   prandom_u32_max(sysctl_tcp_challenge_ack_limit));
 	}
-	if (++challenge_count <= sysctl_tcp_challenge_ack_limit) {
+	count = READ_ONCE(challenge_count);
+	if (count > 0) {
+		WRITE_ONCE(challenge_count, count - 1);
 		NET_INC_STATS(sock_net(sk), LINUX_MIB_TCPCHALLENGEACK);
 		tcp_send_ack(sk);
 	}

programming_language: C