USN-175-1: ntp server vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

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.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 4.10

• ntp-server -
• ntp-simple -
• ntp-refclock -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2005-2496