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-4.2.8p14 was released on 03 March 2020. It addresses 2 medium-severity security issues in ntpd, and provides 47 non-security bugfixes and 4 other improvements over 4.2.8p13.

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

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Are you using Autokey in production? If so, please contact Harlan - he's got some questions for you.

NTP Bug 3072

Attack on interface selection

• Date Resolved: 21 Nov 2016
• References: Sec 3072 / CVE-2016-7429 / VU#633847
• Affects: ntp-4.2.7p385, up to but not including ntp-4.2.8p9, and ntp-4.3.0 up to, but not including ntp-4.3.94 ???.
• CVSS2: LOW 1.0 (AV:L/AC:H/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P)
• CVSS3: LOW 1.6 CVSS:3.0/AV:P/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
• Summary: When ntpd receives a server response on a socket that corresponds to a different interface than was used for the request, the peer structure is updated to use the interface for new requests. If ntpd is running on a host with multiple interfaces in separate networks and the operating system doesn't check source address in received packets (e.g. rp_filter on Linux is set to 0), an attacker that knows the address of the source can send a packet with spoofed source address which will cause ntpd to select wrong interface for the source and prevent it from sending new requests until the list of interfaces is refreshed, which happens on routing changes or every 5 minutes by default. If the attack is repeated often enough (once per second), ntpd will not be able to synchronize with the source.
• Mitigation:
  • Implement BCP-38.
  • Upgrade to 4.2.8p9, or later, from the NTP Project Download Page or the NTP Public Services Project Download Page
  • If you are going to configure your OS to disable source address checks, also configure your firewall configuration to control what interfaces can receive packets from what networks.
  • Properly monitor your ntpd instances, and auto-restart ntpd (without -g) if it stops running.
• Credit: This weakness was discovered by Miroslav Lichvar of Red Hat.