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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.5

CVE-2016-1549 json

A malicious authenticated peer can create arbitrarily-many ephemeral associations in order to win the clock selection algorithm in ntpd in…

published 2017-01-06 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-2644

cvss
6.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.1%
EPSS 3.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 87%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A malicious authenticated peer can create arbitrarily-many ephemeral associations in order to win the clock selection algorithm in ntpd in NTP 4.2.8p4 and earlier and NTPsec 3e160db8dc248a0bcb053b56a80167dc742d2b74 and a5fb34b9cc89b92a8fef2f459004865c93bb7f92 and modify a victim's clock.

Patch / fix

  • ntp Debian 11 1:4.2.8p7+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-1549

  • ntp SLES 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP2-BCL, SLED 12 SP3 +7 more 4.2.8p11-64.5.1
  • ntp SLES for SAP 12 SP3, SLES 12 SP3, SLED 12 SP3 4.2.8p11-64.3.2
  • ntp SLES for SAP 11 SP4, SLES 11 SP4 4.2.8p11-64.4.1
  • ntp SLES for SAP 12, SLES 12, SLED 12 4.2.8p8-46.8.1
  • ntp SLES 11 SP3-TERADATA, SLES 11 SP3-LTSS, SLES 11 SP2-LTSS +3 more 4.2.8p7-44.1
  • ntp SLES 12 SP1, SLES 11 SP4, SLED 12 SP1 +2 more 4.2.8p7-11.1
  • ntp SLES 12-LTSS 4.2.8p11-46.26.2

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:1765-2SUSE-SU-2018:1765-1SUSE-SU-2018:1464-1SUSE-SU-2018:0956-1SUSE-SU-2018:0808-1SUSE-SU-2016:1568-1

  • ntp openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.2.8p9-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10181-1

  • ntp Arch Linux 4.2.8.p11-1

arch linux advisories AVG-647

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-1549 updated cvss 3.5

ntp: ephemeral association time spoofing

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 ntp Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 ntp, ntpdate, ntp-perl Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ntp, sntp, ntpdate, ntp-perl
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Assure only trusted hosts have access to the trustedkey.”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

3.12% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 87% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 6.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
NVD 2.0 4.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:P/A:N

Affected products

  • NTP Project NTP
  • NTPsec Project NTPSec

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-19 Data Processing Errors

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.