Date:         Mon, 22 Nov 1999 22:23:19 +0100
From: Balazs Scheidler <bazsi@BALABIT.HU>
Subject:      Re: DoS with sysklogd, glibc (Caldera)
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM

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>=20
> 1. Problem Description
>=20
>    On Linux, most services do not log informational or error messages
>    to their own files, but use the system log daemon, syslogd, for this.
>=20
>    Unfortunately, the current syslogd has a problem by which any
>    user on the local host can mount a denial of service attack that
>    effectively stops all logging. Since all programs that want to send
>    logging information to syslogd block until they're able to establish
>    a connection to syslogd, this will make programs such as login, su,
>    sendmail, telnetd, etc hang indefinitely.

This fix (and all the fixes released by distributions in the last couple of
days) switches to using SOCK_DGRAM style sockets from using SOCK_STREAM
ones, which may not be the best solution. It can result in arbitrarily
dropped messages.

I think using a limit on incoming connections, rejecting a connection if the
limit is reached, and logging such rejected attempts would be better, since
the system administrator is notified about the event.

The next version of syslog-ng will contain the latter option. (The first
solution is already supported, since it contains a unix-dgram driver):

To use the fix issued by distributors (e.g. switching to unix-dgram) with
syslog-ng, change your source statement:

from: source src { unix-stream("/dev/log"); };
to: source src{ unix-dgram("/dev/log"); };

of course you'll need to apply your local changes.

--=20
Bazsi
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