USN-175-1: ntp server vulnerability
===========================================================
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-175-1 September 01, 2005
ntp vulnerability
CAN-2005-2496
===========================================================
A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:
Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)
The following packages are affected:
ntp-refclock
ntp-server
ntp-simple
The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to
version 1:4.2.0a-10ubuntu2.1. In general, a standard system upgrade is
sufficient to effect the necessary changes.
Details follow:
Thomas Biege discovered a flaw in the privilege dropping of the NTP
server. When ntpd was configured to drop root privileges, and the
group to run under was specified as a name (as opposed to a numeric
group ID), ntpd changed to the wrong group. Depending on the actual
group it changed to, this could either cause non-minimal privileges,
or a malfunctioning ntp server if the group does not have the
privileges that ntpd actually needs.
On Ubuntu 4.10, ntpd does not use privilege dropping by default, so
you are only affected if you manually activated it. In Ubuntu 5.04,
privilege dropping is used by default, but this bug is already fixed.



