Important: openswan security update
Security Advisory: Important
Updated openswan packages that fix various security issues are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.
Openswan is a free implementation of Internet Protocol Security (IPsec)
and Internet Key Exchange (IKE). IPsec uses strong cryptography to provide
both authentication and encryption services. These services allow you to
build secure tunnels through untrusted networks. Everything passing through
the untrusted network is encrypted by the IPsec gateway machine, and
decrypted by the gateway at the other end of the tunnel. The resulting
tunnel is a virtual private network (VPN).
Gerd v. Egidy discovered a flaw in the Dead Peer Detection (DPD) in
Openswan's pluto IKE daemon. A remote attacker could use a malicious DPD
packet to crash the pluto daemon. (CVE-2009-0790)
It was discovered that Openswan's livetest script created temporary files
in an insecure manner. A local attacker could use this flaw to overwrite
arbitrary files owned by the user running the script. (CVE-2008-4190)
Note: The livetest script is an incomplete feature and was not
automatically executed by any other script distributed with Openswan, or
intended to be used at all, as was documented in its man page. In these
updated packages, the script only prints an informative message and exits
immediately when run.
All users of openswan are advised to upgrade to these updated packages,
which contain backported patches to correct these issues. After installing
this update, the ipsec service will be restarted automatically.
Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.
This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259
Vulmon