Bug 457113 (CVE-2008-3270)

Summary: CVE-2008-3270 yum-rhn-plugin: does not verify SSL certificate for all communication with RHN server
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: Tomas Hoger <thoger>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: bkearney, bressers, james.antill, jmatthew, kreilly, mjc, osoukup, pkilambi
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2008-11-13 15:31:03 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On: 436804, 457190, 457191    
Bug Blocks:    

Description Tomas Hoger 2008-07-29 17:55:19 UTC
It was discovered that yum-rhn-plugin does not always properly verify SSL
certificate against configured trusted CA certificate when communicating with
Red Hat Network (RHN) server.  SSL certificate was properly verified for XML-RPC
communication, but the check was not applied to the file downloads.

This can possibly simplify man-in-the-middle attacks, allowing attacker to
provide users with crafted repository meta-data files or RPM packages.  However,
GPG signatures are applied before installing any package, so an attacker could
not use this to trick user to install packages from an untrusted source.

Comment 13 Mark J. Cox 2008-08-14 09:02:28 UTC
Note also that the a successful attacker could also not cause existing installed packages to be downgraded to older versions.  So a successful attack could only 1) provide the victim with older but official Red Hat packages which the user did not already have installed, or deny them the ability to update specific packages.  (However as the attacker has to be in the middle of the conversation to exploit this flaw they could perform a similar denial attack without exploiting this issue).  

CVSS2 score of low, 2.6 (AV:N/AC:H/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N)

Comment 14 Mark J. Cox 2008-08-14 09:03:25 UTC
This issue only affected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and not the package update mechanism as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3, and 4.

Comment 16 Josh Bressers 2008-08-14 12:58:10 UTC
Lifting embargo

Comment 18 Red Hat Product Security 2008-11-13 15:31:03 UTC
This issue was addressed in:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
  http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0815.html