SB2019030602 - Information disclosure in OpenSSL ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher



SB2019030602 - Information disclosure in OpenSSL ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher

Published: March 6, 2019

Security Bulletin ID SB2019030602
Severity
Low
Patch available
YES
Number of vulnerabilities 1
Exploitation vector Remote access
Highest impact Information disclosure

Breakdown by Severity

Low 100%
  • Low
  • Medium
  • High
  • Critical

Description

This security bulletin contains information about 1 security vulnerability.


1) Use of a broken or risky cryptographic algorithm (CVE-ID: CVE-2019-1543)

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to gain access to encrypted data.

The vulnerability exists due to incorrect implementation of the ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher. For messages, encrypted with this cipher, a reused nonce value is used that is susceptible to serious confidentiality and integrity attacks. If an application changes the default nonce length to be longer than 12 bytes and then makes a change to the leading bytes of the nonce expecting the new value to be a new unique nonce then such an application could inadvertently encrypt messages with a reused nonce.

This vulnerability does not affect internal usage of the cipher within OpenSSL. However if an application uses this cipher directly and sets a non-default nonce length to be longer than 12 bytes, it may be vulnerable.

Remediation

Install update from vendor's website.