RHSA-2014:1246 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated nss and nspr packages that fix multiple security issues, several
bugs, and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security
impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give
detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the
CVE links in the References section.

Description

Network Security Services (NSS) is a set of libraries designed to support
the cross-platform development of security-enabled client and server
applications.

A flaw was found in the way TLS False Start was implemented in NSS.
An attacker could use this flaw to potentially return unencrypted
information from the server. (CVE-2013-1740)

A race condition was found in the way NSS implemented session ticket
handling as specified by RFC 5077. An attacker could use this flaw to crash
an application using NSS or, in rare cases, execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user running that application. (CVE-2014-1490)

It was found that NSS accepted weak Diffie-Hellman Key exchange (DHKE)
parameters. This could possibly lead to weak encryption being used in
communication between the client and the server. (CVE-2014-1491)

An out-of-bounds write flaw was found in NSPR. A remote attacker could
potentially use this flaw to crash an application using NSPR or, possibly,
execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running that
application. This NSPR flaw was not exposed to web content in any shipped
version of Firefox. (CVE-2014-1545)

It was found that the implementation of Internationalizing Domain Names in
Applications (IDNA) hostname matching in NSS did not follow the RFC 6125
recommendations. This could lead to certain invalid certificates with
international characters to be accepted as valid. (CVE-2014-1492)

Red Hat would like to thank the Mozilla project for reporting the
CVE-2014-1490, CVE-2014-1491, and CVE-2014-1545 issues. Upstream
acknowledges Brian Smith as the original reporter of CVE-2014-1490, Antoine
Delignat-Lavaud and Karthikeyan Bhargavan as the original reporters of
CVE-2014-1491, and Abhishek Arya as the original reporter of CVE-2014-1545.

The nss and nspr packages have been upgraded to upstream version 3.16.1 and
4.10.6 respectively, which provide a number of bug fixes and enhancements
over the previous versions. (BZ#1110857, BZ#1110860)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, when the output.log file was not present on the system, the

shell in the Network Security Services (NSS) specification handled test
failures incorrectly as false positive test results. Consequently, certain
utilities, such as "grep", could not handle failures properly. This update
improves error detection in the specification file, and "grep" and other
utilities now handle missing files or crashes as intended. (BZ#1035281)

• Prior to this update, a subordinate Certificate Authority (CA) of the

ANSSI agency incorrectly issued an intermediate certificate installed on a
network monitoring device. As a consequence, the monitoring device was
enabled to act as an MITM (Man in the Middle) proxy performing traffic
management of domain names or IP addresses that the certificate holder did
not own or control. The trust in the intermediate certificate to issue the
certificate for an MITM device has been revoked, and such a device can no
longer be used for MITM attacks. (BZ#1042684)

• Due to a regression, MD5 certificates were rejected by default because

Network Security Services (NSS) did not trust MD5 certificates. With this
update, MD5 certificates are supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
(BZ#11015864)

Users of nss and nspr are advised to upgrade to these updated packages,
which correct these issues and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the
Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 1035281 - Suboptimal shell code in nss.spec
• BZ - 1053725 - CVE-2013-1740 nss: false start PR_Recv information disclosure security issue
• BZ - 1060953 - CVE-2014-1490 nss: TOCTOU, potential use-after-free in libssl's session ticket processing (MFSA 2014-12)
• BZ - 1060955 - CVE-2014-1491 nss: Do not allow p-1 as a public DH value (MFSA 2014-12)
• BZ - 1079851 - CVE-2014-1492 nss: IDNA hostname matching code does not follow RFC 6125 recommendation (MFSA 2014-45)
• BZ - 1107432 - CVE-2014-1545 Mozilla: Out of bounds write in NSPR (MFSA 2014-55)
• BZ - 1110857 - Rebase nspr in RHEL 5.11 to NSPR 4.10.6 (required for FF31)
• BZ - 1110860 - Rebase nss in RHEL 5.11 to NSS 3.16.1 (required for FF 31)

CVEs

• CVE-2014-1490
• CVE-2013-1740
• CVE-2014-1492
• CVE-2014-1545
• CVE-2014-1491

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate