CVE-2023-34966

An infinite loop vulnerability was found in Samba's mdssvc RPC service for Spotlight. When parsing Spotlight mdssvc RPC packets sent by the client, the core unmarshalling function sl_unpack_loop() did not validate a field in the network packet that contains the count of elements in an array-like structure. By passing 0 as the count value, the attacked function will run in an endless loop consuming 100% CPU. This flaw allows an attacker to issue a malformed RPC request, triggering an infinite loop, resulting in a denial of service condition.

Red Hat has set this as Moderate severity issue, because this CVE only affects servers where Spotlight is explicitly enabled globally or on individual shares with "spotlight = yes". However, the default spotlight configuration is set as no - Check https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5.html#spotlight.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

As a possible workaround, disable Spotlight by removing all configuration stanzas ("spotlight=yes|true") that enable Spotlight .