Bug 1362016 (CVE-2016-6489) - CVE-2016-6489 nettle: RSA/DSA code is vulnerable to cache-timing related attacks
Summary: CVE-2016-6489 nettle: RSA/DSA code is vulnerable to cache-timing related attacks
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: CVE-2016-6489
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Red Hat Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 1362017 1362018 1362020 1362021 1362022 1364897 1429958 1429959
Blocks: 1323912
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2016-08-01 07:55 UTC by Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala
Modified: 2019-09-29 13:54 UTC (History)
10 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
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Doc Text:
It was found that nettle's RSA and DSA decryption code was vulnerable to cache-related side channel attacks. An attacker could use this flaw to recover the private key from a co-located virtual-machine instance.
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2019-07-12 13:04:19 UTC
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Red Hat Product Errata RHSA-2016:2582 0 normal SHIPPED_LIVE Moderate: nettle security and bug fix update 2016-11-03 12:08:24 UTC

Description Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2016-08-01 07:55:45 UTC 
A cache-related side channel was found in nettle's RSA and DSA decryption code. An attacker could use this flaw to recover the private key, from a co-located virtual-machine instance.


References:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/596.pdf
https://git.lysator.liu.se/nettle/nettle/commit/3fe1d6549765ecfb24f0b80b2ed086fdc818bff3
Comment 1 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2016-08-01 07:56:51 UTC 
Created nettle tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: fedora-all [bug 1362017]
Affects: epel-5 [bug 1362021]
Comment 2 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2016-08-01 07:56:59 UTC 
Created mingw-nettle tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: fedora-all [bug 1362018]
Affects: epel-7 [bug 1362022]
Comment 3 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2016-08-01 07:57:04 UTC 
Created compat-nettle27 tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: fedora-23 [bug 1362020]
Comment 4 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2016-08-01 07:59:23 UTC 
Note:

As per: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q3/206 , the upstream fix has "some unintended side effects" and needs to be reviewed before being applied.
Comment 6 Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos 2016-08-08 07:36:47 UTC 
The upstream author has included sanity checks at the functions using mpz_powm_sec() to prevent crashes by invalid private keys. As such, the unintended side-effects are no longer the case.

https://git.lysator.liu.se/nettle/nettle/commit/52b9223126b3f997c00d399166c006ae28669068
Comment 7 errata-xmlrpc 2016-11-03 19:31:30 UTC 
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Via RHSA-2016:2582 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-2582.html
Comment 16 Product Security DevOps Team 2019-07-12 13:04:19 UTC 
This bug is now closed. Further updates for individual products will be reflected on the CVE page(s):

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2016-6489
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