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Encryption Open Source Security Software The Internet Upgrades

OpenSSL Patches Critical Certificate Forgery Bug 45

Posted by timothy from the quick-fixes-are-good-fixes dept.
msm1267 writes: The mystery OpenSSL patch released today addresses a critical certificate validation issue where anyone with an untrusted TLS certificate can become a Certificate Authority. While serious, the good news according to the OpenSSL Project is that few downstream organizations have deployed the June update where the bug was introduced. From the linked piece: The vulnerability allows an attacker with an untrusted TLS certificate to be treated as a certificate authority and spoof another website. Attackers can use this scenario to redirect traffic, set up man-in-the-middle attacks, phishing schemes and anything else that compromises supposedly encrypted traffic. [Rich Salz, one of the developers] said there are no reports of public exploits.
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OpenSSL Patches Critical Certificate Forgery Bug More

OpenSSL Patches Critical Certificate Forgery Bug

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  • So i understand from this that o don't need to rush & patch my web servers who all have Trusted certs.
    Right ?

    • Did you install the version of OpenSSL that introduced the bug?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Qzukk ( 229616 )

      It sounds like if you are not verifying certificates then it's not critical, but if you've got client certificates to identify/authenticate users you need to update.

      If you're running any kind of client connection (for instance, consuming a https webservice) then you'll need to update (unless they're using gnutls or nss instead of openssl)

      • LibreSSL and BoringSSL? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Thursday July 09, 2015 @12:43PM (#50076359) Homepage Journal

        If you're running any kind of client connection (for instance, consuming a https webservice) then you'll need to update (unless they're using gnutls or nss instead of openssl)

        Are LibreSSL and BoringSSL also affected? The article mentions that a BoringSSL contributor found the problem, but it doesn't say one way or the other whether this misbehavior made it into any releases of BoringSSL or any other OpenSSL fork.

        • According to a posting on the OpenBSD tech mailing list, LibreSSL is not affected.

          .
          http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-te... [marc.info]

          We have received several emails asking if we are impacted by the latest CVE-2015-1793. We are not impacted. The code related to that CVE was added after we forked 1.0.1g and we did not merge these changes from upstream. This CVE only concerns newer OpenSSL releases.

    • So i understand from this that o don't need to rush & patch my web servers who all have Trusted certs. Right ?

      You may want to rush if your web server validates client certificates? That is, does any of your users have to present a certificate to the web server instead of just the opposite way around?

    • AIUI this is mostly a client issue, servers do not normally validate certs presented to them (client certs do exist but they are rarely used and even where they are used afaict it'susually with a "known cert for each user" model rather than a CA based model).

  • Apparently the NSA/FBI needed collect someone's encrypted data in the last year. Now that they have what they want, they are sewing it back up again.

    Though with the NSA's purported computing capability and back doors it doesn't seem like they would need this -- unless some lesser player on the intelligence field got this in -- but then I'm positing corroboration with the OpenSSL folks, so it seems like only a government would be capable of coercing this kind of flaw. But with the underhanded C contest, ma

  • For every one you see, there are tens of thousands more under the cabinet. Outside single user mode this whole certificate thing is not trustworthy in any sense...

  • Don't wanna sound like a witch hunter here but why don't we start checking who and when introduced critical bugs like these?
    Background checks and all...

  • Hey editors - did you mean an "X.509 certificate?"

  • This bug was introduced recently in https://github.com/openssl/ope... [github.com] to add support for "In certain situations the server provided certificate chain may no longer be valid" This bug doesn't affect libressl, boringssl, or vigortls.

  • the good news according to the OpenSSL Project is that few downstream organizations have deployed the June update where the bug was introduced

    Good news everybody, people aren't installing our broken and insecure updates!

  • Theo de Raadt: [theregister.co.uk]

    OpenSSL is not developed by a responsible team.

    Understatement.

  • There was an announcement by RH in response to this, noting that the vulnerabilities were included in a recent release by openSSL, and that they had not gone into RHEL updates, so RHEL is not vulnerable, nor are it's children, like CentOS.

                    mark

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