Moxie Marlinspike discovered that NSS did not properly handle regular expressions in certificate names. A remote attacker could create a specially crafted certificate to cause a denial of service (via application crash) or execute arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-2404)
Moxie Marlinspike and Dan Kaminsky independently discovered that NSS did not properly handle certificates with NULL characters in the certificate name. An attacker could exploit this to perform a man in the middle attack to view sensitive information or alter encrypted communications. (CVE-2009-2408)
4 August 2009
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Moxie Marlinspike discovered that NSS did not properly handle regular expressions in certificate names. A remote attacker could create a specially crafted certificate to cause a denial of service (via application crash) or execute arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-2404)
Moxie Marlinspike and Dan Kaminsky independently discovered that NSS did not properly handle certificates with NULL characters in the certificate name. An attacker could exploit this to perform a man in the middle attack to view sensitive information or alter encrypted communications. (CVE-2009-2408)
Dan Kaminsky discovered NSS would still accept certificates with MD2 hash signatures. As a result, an attacker could potentially create a malicious trusted certificate to impersonate another site. (CVE-2009-2409)
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
After a standard system upgrade you need to restart any applications that use NSS, such as Firefox, to effect the necessary changes.
Vulmon