Avahi is a system which facilitates service discovery on a local network via the mDNS/DNS-SD protocol suite. In versions up to and including 0.9-rc2, the simple protocol server ignores the documented client limit and accepts unlimited connections, allowing for easy local DoS. Although CLIENTS_MAX is defined, server_work() unconditionally accept()s and client_new() always appends the new client and increments n_clients.

There is no check against the limit. When client cannot be accepted as a result of maximal socket number of avahi-daemon, it logs unconditionally error per each connection. Unprivileged local users can exhaust daemon memory and file descriptors, causing a denial of service system-wide for mDNS/DNS-SD.

Exhausting local file descriptors causes increased system load caused by logging errors of each of request. Overloading prevents glibc calls using nss-mdns plugins to resolve *.local. names and link-local addresses. As of time of publication, no known patched versions are available, but a candidate fix is available in pull request 808, and some workarounds are available.

Simple clients are offered for nss-mdns package functionality. It is not possible to disable the unix socket /run/avahi-daemon/socket, but resolution requests received via DBus are not affected directly. Tools avahi-resolve, avahi-resolve-address and avahi-resolve-host-name are not affected, they use DBus interface.

It is possible to change permissions of unix socket after avahi-daemon is started. But avahi-daemon does not provide any configuration for it. Additional access restrictions like SELinux can also prevent unwanted tools to access the socket and keep resolution working for trusted users.