Embargoed until Jan 7th 2009. Incorrect checks for malformed signatures ------------------------------------------- Several functions inside NTP incorrectly checked the result after calling the OpenSSL EVP_VerifyFinal function, allowing a malformed signature to be treated as a good signature rather than as an error. A remote attacker who is in control of a malicious server or who can use a 'man in the middle' attack could present a malformed signature from a certificate chain to a vulnerable client, bypassing validation. This issue would only affect non-default installations that are set up to use cryptography to authenticate clients and servers to each other. This vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2009-0021 and is similar to CVE-2008-5077 which affects OpenSSL itself. The OpenSSL security team would like to thank the Google Security Team for reporting this issue. Projects and products using OpenSSL should audit any use of the routine EVP_VerifyFinal() to ensure that the return code is being correctly handled. As documented, this function returns 1 for a successful verification, 0 for failure, and -1 for an error. I don't have a patch for this but it is easy to spot the problem in the source.
Public now via oCERT advisory: http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2008-016.html Fixed upstream in ntp 4.2.4p6, quoting Changelog: * [Sec 1111] Fix incorrect check of EVP_VerifyFinal()'s return value. and NEWS file: NTP 4.2.4p6 (Harlan Stenn <stenn>, 2009/01/07) Focus: Security Fix Severity: Low This release fixes oCERT.org's CVE-2009-0021, a vulnerability affecting the OpenSSL library relating to the incorrect checking of the return value of EVP_VerifyFinal function. Credit for finding this issue goes to the Google Security Team for finding the original issue with OpenSSL, and to ocert.org for finding the problem in NTP and telling us about it. Upstream bug: https://support.ntp.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=1111 Upstream patch: http://ntp.bkbits.net:8080/ntp-stable/?PAGE=patch&REV=4965b200omtG93jknLgTe7Im_jeN-Q
ntp-4.2.4p6-1.fc9 has been pushed to the Fedora 9 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
ntp-4.2.4p6-1.fc10 has been pushed to the Fedora 10 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
This issue was addressed in: Red Hat Enterprise Linux: http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-0046.html Fedora: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F10/FEDORA-2009-0544 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F9/FEDORA-2009-0547