What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2009-0846

• Severity: critical (CVSS 10.0 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 8.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2009-04-09 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-824

Description

The asn1_decode_generaltime function in lib/krb5/asn.1/asn1_decode.c in the ASN.1 GeneralizedTime decoder in MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) before 1.6.4 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via vectors involving an invalid DER encoding that triggers a free of an uninitialized pointer.

Affected products

• macOS: before 10.5.7 — fixed in 10.5.7
• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 9, 10
• MIT Kerberos 5: before 1.6.4 — fixed in 1.6.4
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 4.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 3.0, 4.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Eus: 4.7
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0
• RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: macOS 10.5.7; MIT Kerberos 5 1.6.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2009/May/msg00002.html
• http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2009/000059.html
• http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=124896429301168&w=2
• http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=130497213107107&w=2
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-0409.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-0410.html
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34594
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34598
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34617
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34622
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34628
• http://secunia.com/advisories/34630

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