4.18. bind

Security Fixes

CVE-2012-1667

A flaw was found in the way BIND handled zero length resource data records. 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 crash or, possibly, disclose portions of its memory.

CVE-2012-1033

A flaw was found in the way BIND handled the updating of cached name server (NS) resource records. A malicious owner of a DNS domain could use this flaw to keep the domain resolvable by the BIND server even after the delegation was removed from the parent DNS zone. With this update, BIND limits the time-to-live of the replacement record to that of the time-to-live of the record being replaced.

BZ#699951

Prior to this update, the code in libdns which sends DNS requests was not robust enough and suffered from a race condition. If a race condition occurred, the "named" name service daemon logged an error message in the format "zone xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa/IN: refresh: failure trying master xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx#53 (source xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx#0): operation canceled" even when zone refresh was successful. This update improves the code to prevent a race condition in libdns and the error no longer occurs in the scenario described.

BZ#700097

A command or script traditionally gives a non-zero exit status to indicate an error. Prior to this update, the nsupdate utility incorrectly returned the exit status "0" (zero) when the target DNS zone did not exist. Consequently, the nsupdate command returned "success" even though the update failed. This update corrects this error and nsupdate now returns the exit status "2" in the scenario described.

BZ#725577

Prior to this update, named did not unload the bind-dyndb-ldap plugin in the correct places in the code. Consequently, named sometimes terminated unexpectedly during reload or stop when the bind-dyndb-ldap plugin was used. This update corrects the code, the plug-in is now unloaded in the correct places, and named no longer crashes in the scenario described.

BZ#693982

A non-writable working directory is a long time feature on all Red Hat systems. Previously, named wrote "the working directory is not writable" as an error to the system log. This update changes the code so that named now writes this information only into the debug log.

BZ#717468

The named initscript lacked the "configtest" option that was available in earlier releases. Consequently, users of the bind initscript could not use the "service named configtest" command. This update adds the option and users can now test their DNS configurations for correct syntax using the "service named configtest" command.

BZ#758669

Prior to this update, errors arising on automatic updates of DNSSEC trust anchors were handled incorrectly. Consequently, the named daemon could become unresponsive on shutdown. With this update, the error handling has been improved and named exits on shutdown gracefully.

BZ#758670

Prior to this update, a race condition could occur on validation of DNSSEC-signed NXDOMAIN responses and the named daemon could terminate unexpectedly. With this update, the underlying code has been fixed and the race condition no longer occurs.

BZ#769366

The multi-threaded named daemon uses the atomic operations feature to speed-up an access to shared data. This feature did not work correctly on the 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC architectures. Therefore, the named daemon sometimes became unresponsive on these architectures. This update disables the atomic operations feature on the 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC architectures, which ensures that the named daemon is now more stable, reliable and no longer hangs.