Apple has slammed the door shut on denial-of-service attacks and a security bypass that Type 0 routing headers in IPv6 let in. The company on June 20 put out an update, Mac OS X 10.4.10, that addresses the problem by disabling support for the headers. This vulnerability has been left wide open in IPv6 even though it was well-known and shut down in IPv4; by default, all routing engines now turn it off.
This particular type of packet header can be used to crazily bounce network packets back and forth between hops on their route, clogging up bandwidth and potentially causing a DoS. Back in April, two researchers, EADS Corporate Research Center research engineers Philippe Biondi and Arnaud Ebalard, showed that when you can specify where your nodes route packets, you can create a loop—for example, from hop A to hop B to hop A to hop B—that exponentially jacks up Internet traffic, thus causing a DDoS (distributed DoS).
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News source: eWeek
This particular type of packet header can be used to crazily bounce network packets back and forth between hops on their route, clogging up bandwidth and potentially causing a DoS. Back in April, two researchers, EADS Corporate Research Center research engineers Philippe Biondi and Arnaud Ebalard, showed that when you can specify where your nodes route packets, you can create a loop—for example, from hop A to hop B to hop A to hop B—that exponentially jacks up Internet traffic, thus causing a DDoS (distributed DoS).
View: The full story News source: eWeek
Great idea. Why don`t I fix bugs like that
This may have been "well known", as in publicly released, but it doesn't mean "well known", as in having been announced 10 years ago. The article says it was announced in April with a demonstration.
Let's do a quick look at other OSes that have patched this:
Red Hat: Patched 5 weeks ago
OpenBSD: Patched 8 weeks ago (if I follow that source patch link right)
Since this specific item doesn't seem to affect Microsoft Windows, I looked up a different IPV6 DoS flaw for Windows, for comparison purposes, and see this:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...n/MS06-064.mspx
It seems that was issued 10/10/2006, and fixed the three items listed here:
http://secunia.com/advisories/22341/
containing advisories from 2004 and 2005.
This may or may not be representative of every Microsoft patch (they are quick on some recent items, if I recall correctly), but it shows that some DoS items can be fixed in months, and some seem to require longer.
Feel free to criticize slow patches where it makes sense, but this news blurb says the problem was demonstrated 8 weeks ago. I don't think that this is enough of a delay for posting vulgarities that Neowin automatically stars out.
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