Linux Virtual Ethernet Bug Delivers Corrupt TCP/IP Data (vijayp.ca)

jones_supa writes: Vijay Pandurangan from Twitter warns about a Linux kernel bug that causes containers using Virtual Ethernet devices for network routing to not check TCP checksums. Examples of software stacks that use Virtual Ethernet devices are Docker on IPv6, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine and Mesos. The kernel flaw results in applications incorrectly receiving corrupt data in a number of situations, such as with bad networking hardware. The bug dates back at least 3 years or more – it is present in kernels as far back as the Twitter engineering team has tested. Their patch has been reviewed and accepted into the kernel, and is currently being backported to -stable releases back to 3.14 in various distributions. If you use containers in your setup, Pandurangan recommends that you deploy a kernel with this patch.

Comments

Twitter's fix shoud be denied

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that they wantonly violate people's civil liberties by shadowbanning twitter accounts of people they deem politically incorrect while continuing to allow tweets from known terrorist groups - Twitters patch should NOT be accepted in accordance with their own code of conduct.

I could have sworn this was intentional

[Verdatum]

I was under the impression that virtual ethernet devices intentionally don't bother verifying checksums, because they were intended to be used in situations where there is very little probability of the data being corrupted.