Re: DoS with sysklogd, glibc (Caldera)

From: Balazs Scheidler (bazsiat_private)
Date: Mon Nov 22 1999 - 13:23:19 PST

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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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