RHEL 5 : nss and nspr (RHSA-2014:1246)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 77699

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

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.

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

Update the affected packages.

See Also

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2013-1740

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2014-1490

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2014-1491

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2014-1492

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2014-1545

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014:1246

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 77699

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2014-1246.nasl

Version: 1.15

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 9/16/2014

Updated: 1/14/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 10

Temporal Score: 7.4

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:nss, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:nss-debuginfo, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:nss-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:nss-pkcs11-devel, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:nss-tools, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 9/16/2014

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2013-1740, CVE-2014-1490, CVE-2014-1491, CVE-2014-1492, CVE-2014-1545

RHSA: 2014:1246