oss-security - Re: CVE Request - GnuTLS corrects flaw in certificate verification (3.1.x/3.2.x)

Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-Id: <201402270538.s1R5busf001393@linus.mitre.org>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:37:56 -0500 (EST)
From: cve-assign@...re.org
To: thoger@...hat.com
Cc: cve-assign@...re.org, oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE Request - GnuTLS corrects flaw in certificate verification (3.1.x/3.2.x)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Use CVE-2009-5138 for the

  https://gitorious.org/gnutls/gnutls/commit/c8dcbedd1fdc312f5b1a70fcfbc1afe235d800cd

issue. This says "Initialy reported by Daniel Kahn Gillmor on 9/1/2008" but
that seems to be a typo of 9/1/2009 (aka 2009-01-09), because the actual
report was in:

  http://lists.gnutls.org/pipermail/gnutls-devel/2009-January/002888.html


> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1069301

> This did not affect applications that used
> GNUTLS_VERIFY_ALLOW_X509_V1_CA_CRT verification flag, which instructs
> GnuTLS to allow root CA certificates to be version 1 certificates.
> This was set by e.g. gnutls-cli client application in GnuTLS versions
> affected by this bug.

Is this setting in gnutls-cli itself a vulnerability, because
GNUTLS_VERIFY_ALLOW_X509_V1_CA_CRT is an unsafe flag for any general-purpose
application? For example,

  http://lists.gnutls.org/pipermail/gnutls-devel/2009-January/002892.html

says:

  GNUTLS_VERIFY_ALLOW_ANY_X509_V1_CA_CRT

  This one is quite dangerous. It allows any intermediate V1 certificate
  to be used as a signer. This means that if I manage to get a CA to give
  me a V1 personal certificate, I can act as a CA if this flag is set.


(In other words, all three CVEs would have the same impact -- something
roughly like "allows remote attackers to have an unintended ability
to issue new certificates by using an arbitrary X.509 V1 certificate --
but two of the CVEs [CVE-2014-1959, CVE-2009-5138] have a root cause
of logic errors in flag operations, whereas the proposed third CVE has a
root cause of a hardcoded unsafe configuration choice in gnutls-cli.)

- -- 
CVE assignment team, MITRE CVE Numbering Authority
M/S M300
202 Burlington Road, Bedford, MA 01730 USA
[ PGP key available through http://cve.mitre.org/cve/request_id.html ]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.14 (SunOS)

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJTDs4QAAoJEKllVAevmvms6CMH/0tir5Aw5SnbdXqGgY02Nstv
40x7v2MOmjWGnt1Z7RYVs6oCK4Cht9TH+CPA2sHX59z3WqplP2cW4y65tOmBJoe6
va9yITRxP+U8qittNOjcRC3wmIrHG0DxqX9qMdmc88rx9aVryWq5aEz5VGtk1E1k
r/L8eF/fAL+Bl67/Vp0xthsciRcSJvuoAyUXnlzhvdRxCtgwG1v1yh5POpHZz5qR
8m3/4hN05xhVQjYrTzCc5NuoCyYm7gcQ57UjuIF5zwAcsrfnHEsGKotBfw/dEgc9
8z3le9HqAvQ/mGd782sikVSsZdkclzRHIfAScQ6Gplv7fgwsItu9/esJMl1EjT4=
=a0uN
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Please check out the Open Source Software Security Wiki, which is counterpart to this mailing list.

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.