Does CVE-2014-3596 affect Red Hat products?

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
    • 6.x
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV)
    • 3.x
  • Red Hat JBoss Portal (JPP)
    • 5.x
    • 6.x
  • Red Hat Network Satellite
    • 5.x

Issue

In late 2012, a research paper was published, showing that several commonly used libraries that handledSSL connections failed to verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's CN or subjectAltName field of the x.509 certificate. Apache Axis 1 was one of these libraries, and the issue in Axis 1 was identified by CVE-2012-5784.

While reviewing the patch in August 2014, engineers from Red Hat Product Security noticed that the fix for CVE-2012-5784 was incomplete. The code added to check that the server hostname matches the domain name in the subject's CN field was flawed. This can be exploited by a Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack where the attacker can spoof a valid certificate using a specially crafted subject. This new issue is identified by CVE-2014-3596.

Note that Axis 1 has reached its end-of-life (EOL) upstream, and the incomplete patch for CVE-2012-5784 was never merged upstream. It was, however, shipped by various vendors, including Debian and Red Hat.

Resolution

Red Hat is currently working on patches for all affected products as a high priority.

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