While investigating GnuTLS issue CVE-2014-1959 (bug 1065092), it was discovered that older versions of GnuTLS were affected by the same problem, with a different root cause. When using default certificate verification settings, GnuTLS accepted version 1 X.509 certificates as intermediate CAs. An attacker able to obtain a V1 certificate from a CA trusted by application could generate certificates for other hosts or users that would be accepted by GnuTLS. This issue affected GnuTLS versions before 2.7.6. Problem was reported in the following post: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.gnutls.devel/3351/focus=3361 and fixed upstream via: https://gitorious.org/gnutls/gnutls/commit/c8dcbedd1fdc312f5b1a70fcfbc1afe235d800cd This did not affect applications that used GNUTLS_VERIFY_ALLOW_X509_V1_CA_CRT verification flag, which instructs GnuTLS to allow root CA certificates to be version 1 certificates. This was set by e.g. gnutls-cli client application in GnuTLS versions affected by this bug. This issue affects gnutls packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Versions used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or current Fedora versions are newer than 2.7.6 and are not affected.
It seems this issue was introduced in upstream version 1.2.1 via: https://gitorious.org/gnutls/gnutls/commit/e0516d09a008352a3481ea518001ae3f58840a5f
CVE-2009-5138 was assigned to this issue: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/12127/focus=12227
Created mingw32-gnutls tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: epel-5 [bug 1071851]
Statement: This issue did not affect the versions of gnutls as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Via RHSA-2014:0247 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0247.html