CVE-2017-11171 Denial of service in n/a

What is CVE-2017-11171?

CVE-2017-11171 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in n/a, published on 11 Jul 2017. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Bad reference counting in the context of accept_ice_connection() in gsm-xsmp-server.c in old versions of gnome-session up until version 2.29.92 allows a local attacker to establish ICE connections to gnome-session with invalid authentication data (an invalid magic cookie). Each failed authentication attempt will leak a file descriptor in gnome-session. When the maximum number of file descriptors is exhausted in the gnome-session process, it will enter an infinite loop trying to communicate without success, consuming 100% of the CPU. The graphical session associated with the gnome-session process will stop working correctly, because communication with gnome-session is no longer possible.

Weakness: CWE-835

Which versions are affected by CVE-2017-11171?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Gnome Gnome-Session.

How do I fix CVE-2017-11171?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2017-11171 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2017-11171 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2017-11171, GHSA-9rpj-3fh9-94x5, SUSE-SU-2017:2173-1.