NTP users are strongly urged to take immediate action to ensure that their NTP daemons are not susceptible to being used in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Please also take this opportunity to defeat denial-of-service attacks by implementing Ingress and Egress filtering through BCP38.

ntp-4.2.8p15 was released on 23 June 2020. It addresses 1 medium-severity security issue in ntpd, and provides 13 non-security bugfixes over 4.2.8p13.

Please see the NTP Security Notice for vulnerability and mitigation details.

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NTP Bug 2938

ntpq saveconfig command allows dangerous characters in filenames

• Date Resolved: Stable (4.2.8p6) 19 Jan 2016; Dev (4.3.90) 19 Jan 2016
• References: Sec 2938 / CVE-2015-7976
• Affects: All ntp-4 releases up to, but not including 4.2.8p6, and 4.3.0 up to, but not including 4.3.90
• CVSS: (AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:N) Base Score: 4.0 MEDIUM
• Summary: The ntpq saveconfig command does not do adequate filtering of special characters from the supplied filename. Note well: The ability to use the saveconfig command is controlled by the restrict nomodify directive, and the recommended default configuration is to disable this capability. If the ability to execute a saveconfig is required, it can easily (and should) be limited and restricted to a known small number of IP addresses.
• Mitigation:
  • Implement BCP-38.
  • use restrict default nomodify in your ntp.conf file.
  • Upgrade to 4.2.8p5, or later, from the NTP Project Download Page or the NTP Public Services Project Download Page.
  • If you are unable to upgrade:
    • build NTP with configure --disable-saveconfig if you will never need this capability, or
    • use restrict default nomodify in your ntp.conf file. Be careful about what IPs have the ability to send modify requests to ntpd.
  • Monitor your ntpd instances.
  • saveconfig requests are logged to syslog - monitor your syslog files.
• Credit: This weakness was discovered by Jonathan Gardner <jonagard@cisco.com> of Cisco ASIG.