CVE-2023-6817

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Important Important Impact What does this mean?
7.8 CVSS v3 Base Score

Description

A use-after-free flaw was found in the Netfilter subsystem in the Linux kernel via the nft_pipapo_walk function. This issue may allow a local user with CAP_NET_ADMIN capability to trigger an application crash, information disclosure, or local privilege escalation.

Statement

Only local users with CAP_NET_ADMIN capability or root can trigger this issue. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux, local unprivileged users can exploit unprivileged user namespaces (CONFIG_USER_NS) to grant themselves this capability.

The OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) control planes or master machines are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) that consists primarily of RHEL components, therefore, it is also affected by this kernel vulnerability. A successful exploit needs necessary privileges (CAP_NET_ADMIN) and direct, local access. A local user in RHCOS is already a root with full permissions, hence existence of this vulnerability does not bring any value from the potential attacker perspective. From the OpenShift containers perspective, this vulnerability cannot be exploited as in OpenShift the cluster processes on the node are namespaced, which means that switching the namespace in the running OpenShift container will not bring necessary capabilities. This means that for OpenShift, the impact of this vulnerability is Low.

Similar to the CVE-2023-32233 vulnerability, this has been explained in the following blog post as an example of a "Container escape vulnerability": This content is not included.https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/containers-vulnerability-risk-assessment

Mitigation

In order to trigger the issue, it requires the ability to create user/net namespaces.

On non-containerized deployments of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, you can disable user namespaces by setting user.max_user_namespaces to 0:

# echo "user.max_user_namespaces=0" > /etc/sysctl.d/userns.conf
# sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/userns.conf

On containerized deployments, such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, do not use this mitigation as the functionality is needed to be enabled.

Additional Information

External References

Content from www.cve.org is not included.https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-6817

Content from nvd.nist.gov is not included.https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-6817

Content from git.kernel.org is not included.https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=317eb9685095678f2c9f5a8189de698c5354316a

Affected Packages and Issued Red Hat Security Errata

Products / Services Components State Errata
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/cluster-logging-operator-bundle Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/cluster-logging-rhel9-operator Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/elasticsearch-operator-bundle Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/elasticsearch-proxy-rhel9 Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/elasticsearch-rhel9-operator Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/elasticsearch6-rhel9 Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/eventrouter-rhel9 Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/fluentd-rhel9 Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/log-file-metric-exporter-rhel9 Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
RHOL-5.8-RHEL-9 openshift-logging/logging-curator5-rhel9 Fixed RHSA-2024:2094
Unless explicitly stated as not affected, all previous versions of packages in any minor update stream of a product listed here should be assumed vulnerable, although may not have been subject to full analysis.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authorities (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications ).

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown Red Hat NVD
CVSS v3 Base Score 7.8 7.8
Attack Vector Local Local
Attack Complexity Low Low
Privileges Required Low Low
User Interaction None None
Scope Unchanged Unchanged
Confidentiality Impact High High
Integrity Impact High High
Availability Impact High High

CVSS v3 Vector

Red Hat CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

NVD CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Acknowledgements

Red Hat would like to thank Xingyuan Mo of IceSword Lab for reporting this issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Red Hat's CVSS v3 score or Impact different from other vendors?

 For open source software shipped by multiple vendors, the CVSS base scores may vary for each vendor's version depending on the version they ship, how they ship it, the platform, and even how the software is compiled. This makes scoring of vulnerabilities difficult for third-party vulnerability databases such as NVD that only provide a single CVSS base score for each vulnerability. Red Hat scores reflect how a vulnerability affects our products specifically.

For more information, see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/762393.

My product is listed as "Under investigation" or "Affected", when will Red Hat release a fix for this vulnerability?
  • "Under investigation" doesn't necessarily mean that the product is affected by this vulnerability. It only means that our Analysis Team is still working on determining whether the product is affected and how it is affected.
  • "Affected" means that our Analysis Team has determined that this product is affected by this vulnerability and might release a fix to address this in the near future.

What can I do if my product is listed as "Will not fix"?

 A "will not fix" status means that a fix for an affected product version is not planned or not possible due to complexity, which may create additional risk.

Available options depend mostly on the Impact of the vulnerability and the current Life Cycle phase of your product. Overall, you have the following options:
  • Upgrade to a supported product version that includes a fix for this vulnerability (recommended).
  • Apply a mitigation (if one exists).
  • Open a This content is not included.support case to request a prioritization of releasing a fix for this vulnerability.

What can I do if my product is listed as "Fix deferred"?

 A deferred status means that a fix for an affected product version is not guaranteed due to higher-priority development work.

Available options depend mostly on the Impact of the vulnerability and the current Life Cycle phase of your product. Overall, you have the following options:
  • Apply a mitigation (if one exists).
  • Open a This content is not included.support case to request a prioritization of releasing a fix for this vulnerability.
  • Red Hat Engineering focuses on addressing high-priority issues based on their complexity or limited lifecycle support. Therefore, lower-priority issues will not receive immediate fixes.

What is a mitigation?

 A mitigation is an action that can be taken to reduce the impact of a security vulnerability, without deploying any fixes.

I have a Red Hat product but it is not in the above list, is it affected?

 The listed products were found to include one or more of the components that this vulnerability affects. These products underwent a thorough evaluation to determine their affectedness by this vulnerability. Note that layered products (such as container-based offerings) that consume affected components from any of the products listed in this table may be affected and are not represented.

Why is my security scanner reporting my product as vulnerable to this vulnerability even though my product version is fixed or not affected?

 In order to maintain code stability and compatibility, Red Hat usually does not rebase packages to entirely new versions. Instead, we backport fixes and new features to an older version of the package we distribute. This can result in some security scanners that only consider the package version to report the package as vulnerable. To avoid this, we suggest that you use an approved vulnerability scanner from our This content is not included.Red Hat Vulnerability Scanner Certification program.