Security update for package openssl-devel

Knowledgebase

(Last modified: 30SEP2003)

solutions Security update for package openssl-devel SuSE Linux Maintenance Web (647992725021650687c721cefd2be3db)

Applies to

Product(s): SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 for S/390 and zSeries
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 for IBM zSeries
SuSE Linux Standard Server 8
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for x86
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IPF
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM iSeries and IBM pSeries
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM S/390 and IBM zSeries
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM zSeries
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64
SuSE Linux Openexchange Server 4

Package: openssl-devel
Release: 20030930
Obsoletes: none

Indications

This update package should be installed on all systems that have the openssl-devel package installed.

Contraindications

None.

Problem description

The National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC, United Kingdom) have prepared a test suite to explore SSH/TLS software's behaviour when presented with malformed client certificates. Stephen Henson, openssl core team member, has identified the corresponding vulnerabilities in the openssl ASN.1 parser code and has provided fixed software. In addition to the ASN.1 parser bugs, other vulnerabilities have been found, identified by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) as CAN-2003-0545, CAN-2003-0543 and CAN-2003-0544. The detailed description of all bugs follows as an excerpt from the original openssl security announcement:

Certain ASN.1 encodings that are rejected as invalid by the parser can trigger a bug in the deallocation of the corresponding data structure, corrupting the stack. This can be used as a denial of service attack. It is currently unknown whether this can be exploited to run malicious code. This issue does not affect OpenSSL 0.9.6.
Unusual ASN.1 tag values can cause an out of bounds read under certain circumstances, resulting in a denial of service vulnerability.
A malformed public key in a certificate will crash the verify code if it is set to ignore public key decoding errors. Public key decode errors are not normally ignored, except for debugging purposes, so this is unlikely to affect production code. Exploitation of an affected application would result in a denial of service vulnerability.
Due to an error in the SSL/TLS protocol handling, a server will parse a client certificate when one is not specifically requested. This by itself is not strictly speaking a vulnerability but it does mean that *all* SSL/TLS servers that use OpenSSL can be attacked using vulnerabilities 1, 2 and 3 even if they don't enable client authentication.

The openssl-devel update package does not have any run-time influence on your system. Instead, it should be used to recompile software that uses the openssl static libraries at compile-time.

Solution

Please install the updates provided at the location noted below.

Installation notes

This update is provided as an RPM package that can easily be installed onto a running system by using this command:
rpm -Fvh openssl-devel.rpm

links to download packages

Download Source Packages

Download the source code of the patches for maintained products.

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