[zeromq-dev] Vulnerability of devices to incoming messages

[Pieter Hintjens]

Hi Benjamin,

Here's a patch for xrep.cpp that silently drops the message if it's
malformed.  This will make the standard devices robust against the
vulnerability you explained.

I've tested it and it works for your test case.  Could you confirm it
works, then I'll commit the change to master.

http://gist.github.com/518810

-Pieter

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 7:30 PM, MinRK <benjaminrk at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is posted here:
> http://github.com/zeromq/zeromq2/issues/issue/46
> with accompanying gist for reproducing the issue.
>
> -MinRK
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 01:25, Pieter Hintjens <ph at imatix.com> wrote:
>>
>> Benjamin,
>>
>> Could you provide a minimal test case that reproduces the problem, and
>> perhaps file an issue on the github tracker, thanks.
>>
>> -Pieter
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:34 AM, MinRK <benjaminrk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> > I'm using ZMQ devices for parallel computing in IPython.  One of our
>> > devices
>> > is a Queue with XREQ on one side and XREP on the other. This model, like
>> > any
>> > device where one socket requires an IDENT prefix (XREP), and the other
>> > does
>> > not prepend a message (anything other than XREP), is vulnerable to
>> > invalid
>> > messages. If the socket that is not XREP receives a single message, that
>> > will be relayed to the XREP as a message with routing IDENTITY but no
>> > content. This fails an assertion, and triggers SIGABRT, bringing down
>> > the
>> > entire process.
>> > It is a security concern for us that _incoming_ messages have the
>> > ability to
>> > crash the device process. Are there any standard models or plans for ZMQ
>> > devices that can survive invalid messages like this?
>> > -MinRK
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> >
>> >
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