RHSA-2013:0875 - Security Advisory

Topic

An update for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.2.0 which fixes one
security issue is now available from the Red Hat Customer Portal.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having
important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)
base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the
CVE link in the References section.

Description

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is a platform for Java applications,
which integrates the JBoss Application Server with JBoss Hibernate and
JBoss Seam.

XML encryption backwards compatibility attacks were found against various
frameworks, including Apache CXF. An attacker could force a server to use
insecure, legacy cryptosystems, even when secure cryptosystems were enabled
on endpoints. By forcing the use of legacy cryptosystems, flaws such as
CVE-2011-1096 and CVE-2011-2487 would be exposed, allowing plain text to be
recovered from cryptograms and symmetric keys. This issue affected both the
JBoss Web Services CXF (jbossws-cxf) and JBoss Web Services Native
(jbossws-native) stacks. (CVE-2012-5575)

Red Hat would like to thank Tibor Jager, Kenneth G. Paterson and Juraj
Somorovsky of Ruhr-University Bochum for reporting this issue.

If you are using jbossws-cxf, then automatic checks to prevent this flaw
are only run when WS-SecurityPolicy is used to enforce security
requirements. It is best practice to use WS-SecurityPolicy to enforce
security requirements.

If you are using jbossws-native, the fix for this flaw is implemented by
two new configuration parameters in the 'encryption' element. This element
can be a child of 'requires' in both client and server wsse configuration
descriptors (set on a per-application basis via the application's
jboss-wsse-server.xml and jboss-wsse-client.xml files). The new attributes
are 'algorithms' and 'keyWrapAlgorithms'. These attributes should contain a
blank space or comma separated list of algorithm IDs that are allowed for
the encrypted incoming message, both for encryption and private key
wrapping. For backwards compatibility, no algorithm checks are performed by
default for empty lists or missing attributes.

For example (do not include the line break in your configuration):

encryption algorithms="aes-192-gcm aes-256-gcm"
keyWrapAlgorithms="rsa_oaep"

Specifies that incoming messages are required to be encrypted, and that the
only permitted encryption algorithms are AES-192 and 256 in GCM mode, and
RSA-OAEP only for key wrapping.

Before performing any decryption, the jbossws-native stack will verify that
each algorithm specified in the incoming messages is included in the
allowed algorithms lists from these new encryption element attributes. The
algorithm values to be used for 'algorithms' and 'keyWrapAlgorithms' are
the same as for 'algorithm' and 'keyWrapAlgorithm' in the 'encrypt'
element.

Warning: Before applying this update, back up your existing JBoss
Enterprise Application Platform installation (including all applications
and configuration files).

All users of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.2.0 as provided from
the Red Hat Customer Portal are advised to apply this update.

Solution

The References section of this erratum contains a download link (you must
log in to download the update). Before applying the update, back up your
existing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform installation (including all
applications and configuration files).

The JBoss server process must be restarted for this update to take effect.

Affected Products

• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Text-Only Advisories x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 880443 - CVE-2012-5575 jbossws-native, jbossws-cxf, apache-cxf: XML encryption backwards compatibility attacks

CVEs

• CVE-2012-5575

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important
• https://access.redhat.com/jbossnetwork/restricted/listSoftware.html?product=appplatform&downloadType=securityPatches&version=5.2.0
• http://ws.apache.org/wss4j/best_practice.html
• http://cxf.apache.org/cve-2012-5575.html