Applications that use a non-default option when verifying certificates may be
vulnerable to an attack from a malicious CA to circumvent certain checks.
Invalid certificate policies in leaf certificates are silently ignored by
OpenSSL and other certificate policy checks are skipped for that certificate.
A malicious CA could use this to deliberately assert invalid certificate policies
in order to circumvent policy checking on the certificate altogether.
Policy processing is disabled by default but can be enabled by passing
the `-policy' argument to the command line utilities or by calling the
`X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()' function.
The function X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() is documented to
implicitly enable the certificate policy check when doing certificate
verification. However the implementation of the function does not
enable the check which allows certificates with invalid or incorrect
policies to pass the certificate verification.
As suddenly enabling the policy check could break existing deployments it was
decided to keep the existing behavior of the X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy()
function.
Instead the applications that require OpenSSL to perform certificate
policy check need to use X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies() or explicitly
enable the policy check by calling X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set_flags() with
the X509_V_FLAG_POLICY_CHECK flag argument.
Certificate policy checks are disabled by default in OpenSSL and are not
commonly used by applications.
A security vulnerability has been identified in all supported versions
of OpenSSL related to the verification of X.509 certificate chains
that include policy constraints. Attackers may be able to exploit this
vulnerability by creating a malicious certificate chain that triggers
exponential use of computational resources, leading to a denial-of-service
(DoS) attack on affected systems.
Policy processing is disabled by default but can be enabled by passing
the `-policy' argument to the command line utilities or by calling the
`X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()' function.
A read buffer overrun can be triggered in X.509 certificate verification,
specifically in name constraint checking. Note that this occurs
after certificate chain signature verification and requires either a
CA to have signed the malicious certificate or for the application to
continue certificate verification despite failure to construct a path
to a trusted issuer.
The read buffer overrun might result in a crash which could lead to
a denial of service attack. In theory it could also result in the disclosure
of private memory contents (such as private keys, or sensitive plaintext)
although we are not aware of any working exploit leading to memory
contents disclosure as of the time of release of this advisory.
In a TLS client, this can be triggered by connecting to a malicious
server. In a TLS server, this can be triggered if the server requests
client authentication and a malicious client connects.
The public API function BIO_new_NDEF is a helper function used for streaming
ASN.1 data via a BIO. It is primarily used internally to OpenSSL to support the
SMIME, CMS and PKCS7 streaming capabilities, but may also be called directly by
end user applications.
The function receives a BIO from the caller, prepends a new BIO_f_asn1 filter
BIO onto the front of it to form a BIO chain, and then returns the new head of
the BIO chain to the caller. Under certain conditions, for example if a CMS
recipient public key is invalid, the new filter BIO is freed and the function
returns a NULL result indicating a failure. However, in this case, the BIO chain
is not properly cleaned up and the BIO passed by the caller still retains
internal pointers to the previously freed filter BIO. If the caller then goes on
to call BIO_pop() on the BIO then a use-after-free will occur. This will most
likely result in a crash.
This scenario occurs directly in the internal function B64_write_ASN1() which
may cause BIO_new_NDEF() to be called and will subsequently call BIO_pop() on
the BIO. This internal function is in turn called by the public API functions
PEM_write_bio_ASN1_stream, PEM_write_bio_CMS_stream, PEM_write_bio_PKCS7_stream,
SMIME_write_ASN1, SMIME_write_CMS and SMIME_write_PKCS7.
Other public API functions that may be impacted by this include
i2d_ASN1_bio_stream, BIO_new_CMS, BIO_new_PKCS7, i2d_CMS_bio_stream and
i2d_PKCS7_bio_stream.
The OpenSSL cms and smime command line applications are similarly affected.
An invalid pointer dereference on read can be triggered when an
application tries to load malformed PKCS7 data with the
d2i_PKCS7(), d2i_PKCS7_bio() or d2i_PKCS7_fp() functions.
The result of the dereference is an application crash which could
lead to a denial of service attack. The TLS implementation in OpenSSL
does not call this function however third party applications might
call these functions on untrusted data.
An invalid pointer dereference on read can be triggered when an
application tries to check a malformed DSA public key by the
EVP_PKEY_public_check() function. This will most likely lead
to an application crash. This function can be called on public
keys supplied from untrusted sources which could allow an attacker
to cause a denial of service attack.
The TLS implementation in OpenSSL does not call this function
but applications might call the function if there are additional
security requirements imposed by standards such as FIPS 140-3.
There is a type confusion vulnerability relating to X.400 address processing
inside an X.509 GeneralName. X.400 addresses were parsed as an ASN1_STRING but
the public structure definition for GENERAL_NAME incorrectly specified the type
of the x400Address field as ASN1_TYPE. This field is subsequently interpreted by
the OpenSSL function GENERAL_NAME_cmp as an ASN1_TYPE rather than an
ASN1_STRING.
When CRL checking is enabled (i.e. the application sets the
X509_V_FLAG_CRL_CHECK flag), this vulnerability may allow an attacker to pass
arbitrary pointers to a memcmp call, enabling them to read memory contents or
enact a denial of service. In most cases, the attack requires the attacker to
provide both the certificate chain and CRL, neither of which need to have a
valid signature. If the attacker only controls one of these inputs, the other
input must already contain an X.400 address as a CRL distribution point, which
is uncommon. As such, this vulnerability is most likely to only affect
applications which have implemented their own functionality for retrieving CRLs
over a network.
A NULL pointer can be dereferenced when signatures are being
verified on PKCS7 signed or signedAndEnveloped data. In case the hash
algorithm used for the signature is known to the OpenSSL library but
the implementation of the hash algorithm is not available the digest
initialization will fail. There is a missing check for the return
value from the initialization function which later leads to invalid
usage of the digest API most likely leading to a crash.
The unavailability of an algorithm can be caused by using FIPS
enabled configuration of providers or more commonly by not loading
the legacy provider.
PKCS7 data is processed by the SMIME library calls and also by the
time stamp (TS) library calls. The TLS implementation in OpenSSL does
not call these functions however third party applications would be
affected if they call these functions to verify signatures on untrusted
data.
A timing based side channel exists in the OpenSSL RSA Decryption implementation
which could be sufficient to recover a plaintext across a network in a
Bleichenbacher style attack. To achieve a successful decryption an attacker
would have to be able to send a very large number of trial messages for
decryption. The vulnerability affects all RSA padding modes: PKCS#1 v1.5,
RSA-OEAP and RSASVE.
For example, in a TLS connection, RSA is commonly used by a client to send an
encrypted pre-master secret to the server. An attacker that had observed a
genuine connection between a client and a server could use this flaw to send
trial messages to the server and record the time taken to process them. After a
sufficiently large number of messages the attacker could recover the pre-master
secret used for the original connection and thus be able to decrypt the
application data sent over that connection.