GnuPG and GnuPG2 are found to have a flaw, where the key flags are misinterpreted, which could possibly lead to a breach of confidentiality or a mistaken identity verification. Key flags are the packets, that indicated the capabilities of the key, represented as binary flags. The issue is that if a key or subkey has this "key flags" subpacket attached with all bits cleared (off), GnuPG currently treats the key as having all bits set (on), though the thing to note is that the keys with this sort of marker are very rare in the wild. The risks are unlikely today, and they are not particularly dangerous, but the keyholder's stated intent of separating out keys by context of use is being ignored, so there is a window of vulnerability that should not be open. References: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2013/q3/599 https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=484836 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=840510
Patches are available, but appear to only be applied on the development branch (2.1.x). So stable branches 1.4.x and 2.0.x remain vulnerable at the moment.
Created gnupg2 tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1010141] Affects: epel-5 [bug 1010142]
Created gnupg tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1010140]
gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc20 has been pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
Upstream patch: http://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg.git;a=commitdiff;h=4bde12206c5bf199dc6e12a74af8da4558ba41bf
gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2013:1459 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-1459.html
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2013:1458 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-1458.html
gnupg-1.4.15-1.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.