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CERT Coordination Center

Multiple vulnerabilities in SSL/TLS implementations

Vulnerability Note VU#104280

Original Release Date: 2003-09-30 | Last Revised: 2004-08-25

Overview

Multiple vulnerabilities exist in different vendors' SSL/TLS implementations. The impacts of these vulnerabilities include remote execution of arbitrary code, denial of service, and disclosure of sensitive information.

Description

The U.K. National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) has reported multiple vulnerabilities in different vendors' implementations of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. SSL and TLS are commonly used to provide authentication, encryption, integrity, and non-repudiation services to network applications such as HTTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, and others. Clients and servers exchange authentication information in X.509 certificates. While the SSL and TLS protocols do not use ASN.1/BER to communicate at the application layer, they do require an ASN.1 parser to encode and decode X.509 certificates and other cryptographic elements (e.g., PKCS#1 encoded RSA values and PKCS#7 encoded S/MIME parts) at the presentation layer.

A test suite developed by NISCC has exposed vulnerabilities in a variety of SSL/TLS implementations. While most of these vulnerabilities exist in ASN.1 parsing routines, some vulnerabilities may occur elsewhere. Note that cryptographic libraries that implement SSL/TLS frequently provide more general-purpose cryptographic utility. In such libraries, it is common for ASN.1 parsing code to be shared between SSL/TLS and other cryptographic functions.

Due to the general lack of specific vulnerability information, this document covers multiple vulnerabilities in different SSL/TLS implementations. Information about individual vendors is available in the Systems Affected section. Note that VU#104280 broadly covers ASN.1 related vulnerabilities in SSL/TLS implementations other than OpenSSL. VU#255484, VU#732952, VU#380864, VU#686224, and VU#935264 are specific to OpenSSL.

Further information is available in NISCC advisory 006489/TLS.

This set of vulnerabilities is different from those described in VU#748355/CA-2002-23.

Impact

The impacts associated with these vulnerabilities include execution of arbitrary code, denial of service, and disclosure of sensitive information.

Solution

Patch or Upgrade
Apply a patch or upgrade as appropriate. Information about specific vendors is available in the Systems Affected section of this document.

Vendor Information

104280
 

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CVSS Metrics

Group Score Vector
Base 0 AV:--/AC:--/Au:--/C:--/I:--/A:--
Temporal 0 E:Not Defined (ND)/RL:Not Defined (ND)/RC:Not Defined (ND)
Environmental 0 CDP:Not Defined (ND)/TD:Not Defined (ND)/CR:Not Defined (ND)/IR:Not Defined (ND)/AR:Not Defined (ND)

References

Acknowledgements

This vulnerability was discovered and researched by NISCC.

This document was written by Art Manion.

Other Information

CVE IDs: None
CERT Advisory: CA-2003-26
Severity Metric: 11.81
Date Public: 2003-09-30
Date First Published: 2003-09-30
Date Last Updated: 2004-08-25 17:54 UTC
Document Revision: 27

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