| Description: | The OpenSSL toolkit provides support for secure communications between machines. OpenSSL includes a certificate management tool and shared libraries which provide various cryptographic algorithms and protocols.
Tavis Ormandy and Will Drewry of the Google Security Team discovered a buffer overflow in the SSL_get_shared_ciphers() utility function. An attacker could send a list of ciphers to an application that used this function and overrun a buffer (CVE-2006-3738). Few applications make use of this vulnerable function and generally it is used only when applications are compiled for debugging.
Tavis Ormandy and Will Drewry of the Google Security Team discovered a flaw in the SSLv2 client code. When a client application used OpenSSL to create an SSLv2 connection to a malicious server, that server could cause the client to crash. (CVE-2006-4343)
Dr S. N. Henson of the OpenSSL core team and Open Network Security recently developed an ASN.1 test suite for NISCC (www.niscc.gov.uk) which uncovered denial of service vulnerabilities:
Certain public key types can take disproportionate amounts of time to process, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2006-2940)
During parsing of certain invalid ASN.1 structures an error condition was mishandled. This can result in an infinite loop which consumed system memory (CVE-2006-2937). This issue does not affect the OpenSSL version distributed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1.
These vulnerabilities can affect applications which use OpenSSL to parse ASN.1 data from untrusted sources, including SSL servers which enable client authentication and S/MIME applications.
Users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.
Note: After installing this update, users are advised to either restart all services that use OpenSSL or restart their system.
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