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Home >> Browse Vulnerability Assessment Database >> Mandrake Local Security Checks >> MDKSA-2005:179: openssl

Vulnerability Assessment Details

MDKSA-2005:179: openssl

Vulnerability Assessment Summary
Check for the version of the openssl package

Detailed Explanation for this Vulnerability Assessment

The remote host is missing the patch for the advisory MDKSA-2005:179 (openssl).

Yutaka Oiwa discovered vulnerability potentially affects applications that use
the SSL/TLS server implementation provided by OpenSSL.

Such applications are affected if they use the option
SSL_OP_MSIE_SSLV2_RSA_PADDING. This option is implied by use of SSL_OP_ALL,
which is intended to work around various bugs in third- party software that
might prevent interoperability. The SSL_OP_MSIE_SSLV2_RSA_PADDING option
disables a verification step in the SSL 2.0 server supposed to prevent active
protocol-version rollback attacks. With this verification step disabled, an
attacker acting as a 'man in the middle' can force a client and a server to
negotiate the SSL 2.0 protocol even if these parties both support SSL 3.0 or
TLS 1.0. The SSL 2.0 protocol is known to have severe cryptographic weaknesses
and is supported as a fallback only. (CVE-2005-2969)

The current default algorithm for creating 'message digests' (electronic
signatures) for certificates created by openssl is MD5. However, this algorithm
is not deemed secure any more, and some practical attacks have been
demonstrated which could permit a possible hacker to forge certificates with a valid
certification authority signature even if he does not know the secret CA
signing key.

To address this issue, openssl has been changed to use SHA-1 by default. This
is a more appropriate default algorithm for the majority of use cases. If you
still want to use MD5 as default, you can revert this change by changing the
two instances of 'default_md = sha1' to 'default_md = md5' in /usr/{lib,lib64}/
ssl/openssl.cnf. (CVE-2005-2946)

Solution : http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDKSA-2005:179
Network Security Threat Level: High

Networks Security ID:

Vulnerability Assessment Copyright: This script is Copyright (C) 2005 Tenable Network Security

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