REDHAT-BUG-2539385: Medium severity Gnome gnome-remote-desktop vulnerability
A denial-of-service flaw was found in gnome-remote-desktop's RDP connection throttling. GrdThrottler charges an accepted TCP connection against the per-source and global connection limits before authentication, but no absolute deadline requires the peer to complete the RDP handshake. An unauthenticated remote attacker can therefore keep admitted sockets open indefinitely and retain all available slots. With the default limits, an attacker able to connect from two source IP addresses can hold five connections from each address, exhaust the ten global slots, and prevent new RDP handshakes until a holding connection closes. This is an incomplete resource-exhaustion fix for CVE-2025-5024. The issue begins with the introduction of GrdThrottler in commit 959cd39a and affects releases from 50.beta onward, including 50.0 through 50.2 and the reviewed 51 prereleases and main branch. Existing authenticated sessions were not shown to terminate, and no confidentiality, integrity, or code-execution impact is claimed. The upstream report includes a reproducer and reports no released fix at the time of filing. Reported to Red Hat through PSIRTSUPT-24484.
Affected Software
Event History
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a default deployment susceptible to service disruption?
Yes. Under the default limits, an attacker connecting from two source IP addresses can keep five admitted connections open from each address, exhausting all ten global RDP connection slots.
What access does an attacker need to cause the denial of service?
The attacker only needs to be able to establish TCP connections to the RDP service. Authentication is not required, because connections are counted before the RDP handshake completes and can be held open indefinitely.
Which versions are affected?
The issue affects releases from 50.beta onward, including 50.0 through 50.2, reviewed 51 prereleases, and the main branch. It begins with the introduction of GrdThrottler in commit 959cd39a.