Synopsis

Critical: nss security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Critical

Topic

An update for nss is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 Long Life.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of
Critical. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a
detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE
link(s) 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.

Security Fix(es):

• An out-of-bounds write flaw was found in the way NSS performed certain

Base64-decoding operations. An attacker could use this flaw to create a
specially crafted certificate which, when parsed by NSS, could cause it to crash
or execute arbitrary code, using the permissions of the user running an
application compiled against the NSS library. (CVE-2017-5461)

Red Hat would like to thank the Mozilla project for reporting this issue.
Upstream acknowledges Ronald Crane as the original reporter.

Solution

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in
this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

After installing this update, applications using NSS (for example, Firefox) must
be restarted for this update to take effect.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 5.9 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 5.9 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - AUS 5.9 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 1440080 - CVE-2017-5461 nss: Write beyond bounds caused by bugs in Base64 de/encoding in nssb64d.c and nssb64e.c (MFSA 2017-10)

CVEs

• CVE-2017-5461

References