Red Hat Security Advisory: gnutls security update

Important

A flaw was found in gnutls. This vulnerability occurs because gnutls performs case-sensitive comparisons of `nameConstraints` labels, specifically for `dNSName` (DNS) or `rfc822Name` (email) constraints within `excludedSubtrees` or `permittedSubtrees`. A remote attacker can exploit this by crafting a leaf certificate with casing differences in the Subject Alternative Name (SAN), leading to a policy bypass where a certificate that should be rejected is instead accepted. This could result in unauthorized access or information disclosure.

CWE-178 - Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity

A flaw was found in libgnutls. A remote attacker, by sending an extremely short premaster secret during an RSA key exchange to a server using an RSA key backed by a PKCS#11 token, could trigger a short heap overread. This memory corruption vulnerability could lead to information disclosure.

CWE-1284 - Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input

A flaw in GnuTLS DTLS handshake parsing allows malformed fragments with zero length and non-zero offset, leading to an integer underflow during reassembly and resulting in an out-of-bounds read. This issue is remotely exploitable and may cause information disclosure or denial of service.

CWE-191 - Integer Underflow (Wrap or Wraparound)

A heap buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the DTLS handshake fragment reassembly logic of GnuTLS. The issue arises in merge_handshake_packet() where incoming handshake fragments are matched and merged based solely on handshake type, without validating that the message_length field remains consistent across all fragments of the same logical message. An attacker can exploit this by sending crafted DTLS fragments with conflicting message_length values, causing the implementation to allocate a buffer based on a smaller initial fragment and subsequently write beyond its bounds using larger, inconsistent fragments. Because the merge operation does not enforce proper bounds checking against the allocated buffer size, this results in an out-of-bounds write on the heap. The vulnerability is remotely exploitable without authentication via the DTLS handshake path and can lead to application crashes or potential memory corruption.

CWE-130 - Improper Handling of Length Parameter Inconsistency

A flaw was found in gnutls. A remote attacker could exploit an issue in the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) packet reordering logic. The comparator function, responsible for ordering DTLS packets by sequence numbers, did not correctly handle packets with duplicate sequence numbers. This could lead to unstable packet ordering or undefined behavior, resulting in a denial of service.

CWE-475 - Undefined Behavior for Input to API

A flaw was found in gnutls. Servers configured with RSA-PSK (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman – Pre-Shared Key) wrongfully matched usernames containing a NUL character with truncated usernames. A remote attacker could exploit this by sending a specially crafted username, leading to an authentication bypass. This vulnerability allows an attacker to gain unauthorized access by circumventing the authentication process.

A flaw was found in gnutls. This vulnerability occurs because permitted name constraints were incorrectly ignored when previous Certificate Authorities (CAs) only had excluded name constraints. A remote attacker could exploit this to bypass critical name constraint checks during certificate validation. This bypass could lead to the acceptance of invalid certificates, potentially enabling spoofing or man-in-the-middle attacks against affected systems.

CWE-295 - Improper Certificate Validation

A flaw was found in gnutls. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by presenting a specially crafted certificate that contains Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) or Service (SRV) Subject Alternative Names (SANs). This could cause the certificate validation process to incorrectly fall back to checking DNS hostnames against the Common Name (CN), potentially allowing the attacker to spoof legitimate services or intercept sensitive information.

CWE-295 - Improper Certificate Validation