The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

Patron of October 28

Spooky SSLHoly card for spooky-ssl, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 X.509 @ Spooky SSL TERROR MAIOR MALO
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Saint Spooky SSL, the Critical That Became High

Patron of OpenSSL 3.0, crafted email addresses, and everyone who held their breath for the announcement.

Life

On 28 October 2022 OpenSSL released 3.0.7 to fix two overflows in X.509 certificate verification, inside the name-constraint check. A malicious email address in a certificate could overflow the stack buffer. Pre-announced as "critical", the first bug was later downgraded to "high" when it emerged that stack protections made code execution hard. The wait, dubbed Spooky SSL for its nearness to Halloween, was worse than the scare.

Prayer

O Saint Spooky SSL, who frightens more with the announcement than the bug, let our OpenSSL be updated before the holiday. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating OpenSSL to 3.0.7 and remembering that not every pre-announced "critical" is truly scary.

Big announcement, small scare.

Technical record

Disclosed on
October 28 2022
CVE
CVE-2022-3602CVE-2022-3786
CVSS
7.5
Product
OpenSSL · OpenSSL

A buffer overrun can be triggered in X.509 certificate verification, specifically in name constraint checking. Note that this occurs after certificate chain signature verification and requires either a CA to have signed the malicious certificate or for the application to continue certificate verification despite failure to construct a path to a trusted issuer. An attacker can craft a malicious email address to overflow four attacker-controlled bytes on the stack. This buffer overflow could result in a crash (causing a denial of service) or potentially remote code execution. Many platforms implement stack overflow protections which would mitigate against the risk of remote code execution. The risk may be further mitigated based on stack layout for any given platform/compiler. Pre-announcements of CVE-2022-3602 described this issue as CRITICAL. Further analysis based on some of the mitigating factors described above have led this to be downgraded to HIGH. Users are still encouraged to upgrade to a new version as soon as possible. In a TLS client, this can be triggered by connecting to a malicious server. In a TLS server, this can be triggered if the server requests client authentication and a malicious client connects. Fixed in OpenSSL 3.0.7 (Affected 3.0.0,3.0.1,3.0.2,3.0.3,3.0.4,3.0.5,3.0.6).

Sources: github.com · forescout.com

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