Important: bind security and bug fix update

Synopsis

Important: bind security and bug fix update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

Updated bind packages that fix one security issue and one bug are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having
important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the
CVE link in the References section.

Description

The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) is an implementation of the Domain
Name System (DNS) protocols. BIND includes a DNS server (named); a resolver
library (routines for applications to use when interfacing with DNS); and
tools for verifying that the DNS server is operating correctly.

A flaw was found in the way BIND handled resource records with a large
RDATA value. A malicious owner of a DNS domain could use this flaw to
create specially-crafted DNS resource records, that would cause a recursive
resolver or secondary server to exit unexpectedly with an assertion
failure. (CVE-2012-4244)

This update also fixes the following bug:

• The bind-chroot-admin script, executed when upgrading the bind-chroot
  package, failed to correctly update the permissions of the
  /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf file. Depending on the permissions of the
  file, this could have prevented named from starting after installing
  package updates. With this update, bind-chroot-admin correctly updates the
  permissions and ownership of the file. (BZ#857056)
  

Users of bind are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
correct these issues. After installing the update, the BIND daemon (named)
will be restarted automatically.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 856754 - CVE-2012-4244 bind: specially crafted resource record causes named to exit
• BZ - 857056 - bind-chroot-admin changes /etc/named.conf owhership but doesn't change it's perms

CVEs

• CVE-2012-4244

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important
• http://www.isc.org/software/bind/advisories/cve-2012-4244