Updated krb5 packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section. Description Kerberos is a network authentication system which allows clients and servers to authenticate to each other using symmetric encryption and a trusted third-party, the Key Distribution Center . An uninitialized pointer use flaw was found in the way the MIT Kerberos KDC handled initial authentication requests . A remote, unauthenticated attacker could use this flaw to crash the KDC via a specially-crafted AS-REQ request. A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the MIT Kerberos administration daemon, kadmind. A Kerberos administrator who has the "create" privilege could use this flaw to crash kadmind. Red Hat would like to thank the MIT Kerberos project for reporting CVE-2012-1015. Upstream acknowledges Emmanuel Bouillon as the original reporter of CVE-2012-1015. All krb5 users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. After installing the updated packages, the krb5kdc and kadmind daemons will be restarted automatically.