New OpenSSL vulnerability puts encrypted communications at risk of spying
June 6, 2014 – 5:30 AMA newly discovered vulnerability that allows spying on encrypted SSL/TLS communications has been identified and fixed in the widely used OpenSSL library.
The vulnerability, which is being tracked as CVE-2014-0224, can be exploited to decrypt and modify SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) traffic between clients and servers that use OpenSSL, if the version of the library on the server is 1.0.1 or newer.
In order to pull off a successful attack, the attacker would first need to be able to intercept connections between a targeted client and a server. This is known as a man-in-the-middle (MitM) position and can be gained on insecure wireless networks, by hacking into routers or by using other methods.
The security flaw was discovered by Masashi Kikuchi, a researcher from Japanese IT consulting company Lepidum, and was patched in OpenSSL 0.9.8za, 1.0.0m and 1.0.1h released Thursday. These new versions also address three denial-of-service issues and a remote code execution vulnerability when the library is used for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) connections.
The man-in-the-middle attack is possible because OpenSSL accepts ChangeCipherSpec (CCS) messages inappropriately during a TLS handshake, Kikuchi said in a blog post. These messages, which mark the change from unencrypted to encrypted traffic, must be sent at specific times during the TLS handshake, but OpenSSL accepts CCS messages at other times as well, Kikuchi said.
The problematic code has existed since at least OpenSSL 0.9.1c, which was released in December 1998, so the bug is over 15 years old, Adam Langley, a senior software engineer at Google, said in an analysis of the issue posted on his personal blog.
