Openswan is a free implementation of Internet Protocol Security and Internet Key Exchange . IPsec uses strong cryptography to provide both authentication and encryption services. These services allow you to build secure tunnels through untrusted networks. A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the way Openswan"s pluto IKE daemon handled certain error conditions. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could send a specially-crafted IKE packet that would crash the pluto daemon. Red Hat would like to thank the Openswan project for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Paul Wouters as the original reporter. All users of openswan are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. After installing this update, the ipsec service will be restarted automatically.