Open Stack

Unless there's a way for a malicious actor to trigger and take advantage
of this condition, this is probably a class D (security hardening
opportunity) report: https://security.openstack.org/vmt-process.html
#incident-report-taxonomy

** Also affects: ossa
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Changed in: ossa
       Status: New => Won't Fix

** Information type changed from Public Security to Public

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1819957

Title:
  Caching with stale data when a server disconnects due to network
  partition and reconnects

Status in OpenStack Identity (keystone):
  Triaged
Status in keystonemiddleware:
  Triaged
Status in oslo.cache:
  New
Status in OpenStack Security Advisory:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  The flush_on_reconnect optional flag is not used. This can cause stale
  data to be utilized from a cache server that disconnected due to a
  network partition. This has security concerns as follows:

  1*  Password changes/user changes may be reverted for the cache TTL
  1a* User may get locked out if PCI-DSS is on and the password change happens during the network
      partition.
  2*  Grant changes may be reverted for the cache TTL
  3*  Resources (all types) may become "undeleted" for the cache TTL
  4*  Tokens (KSM) may become valid again during the cache TTL

  
  As noted in the python-memcached library:

      @param flush_on_reconnect: optional flag which prevents a
              scenario that can cause stale data to be read: If there's more
              than one memcached server and the connection to one is
              interrupted, keys that mapped to that server will get
              reassigned to another. If the first server comes back, those
              keys will map to it again. If it still has its data, get()s
              can read stale data that was overwritten on another
              server. This flag is off by default for backwards
              compatibility.

  The solution is to explicitly pass flush_on_reconnect as an optional
  argument. A concern with this model is that the memcached servers may
  be utilized by other tooling and may lose cache state (in the case the
  oslo.cache connection is the only thing affected by the network
  partitioning).

  This similarly needs to be addressed in pymemcache when it is utilized
  in lieu of python-memcached.

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