pyopenssl vulnerability

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2013-4314  

Fraudulent security certificates could allow sensitive information to be exposed when accessing the Internet.

It was discovered that pyOpenSSL did not properly handle certificates with NULL characters in the Subject Alternative Name field. An attacker could exploit this to perform a man in the middle attack to view sensitive information or alter encrypted communications.

23 September 2013

pyopenssl vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 13.04
  • Ubuntu 12.10
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Summary

Fraudulent security certificates could allow sensitive information to be exposed when accessing the Internet.

Software Description

  • pyopenssl - Python wrapper around the OpenSSL library

Details

It was discovered that pyOpenSSL did not properly handle certificates with NULL characters in the Subject Alternative Name field. An attacker could exploit this to perform a man in the middle attack to view sensitive information or alter encrypted communications.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 13.04
python-openssl - 0.13-2ubuntu3.1
python3-openssl - 0.13-2ubuntu3.1
Ubuntu 12.10
python-openssl - 0.13-2ubuntu1.1
python3-openssl - 0.13-2ubuntu1.1
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
python-openssl - 0.12-1ubuntu2.1
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
python-openssl - 0.10-1ubuntu0.1

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References