Use of a broken or risky cryptographic algorithm in OpenSSL - CVE-2019-1543

 

Use of a broken or risky cryptographic algorithm in OpenSSL - CVE-2019-1543

Published: March 6, 2019 / Updated: December 2, 2019


Vulnerability identifier: #VU17908
CSH Severity: Low
CVSS v4: 6.3 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N]
CVE-ID: CVE-2019-1543
CWE-ID: CWE-327
Exploitation vector: Remote access
Exploit availability: No public exploit available

Vulnerability details

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.

Affected software

OpenSSL
Arch Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for x86_64
Opensuse
Fedora
openssl (Debian package)
openssl (Alpine package)
file (Alpine package)
compat-openssl10
Oracle VM VirtualBox
MySQL Connectors
Enterprise Manager Base Platform
Contrail Networking
Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery

How to mitigate CVE-2019-1543

The vendor has issued patches that are available from the repository.

OpenSSL - addressed in versions 1.1.0k, 1.1.1c
openssl (Debian package) - update to 1.1.0k-1~deb9u1
openssl (Alpine package) - update to 1.1.1b-r1
Oracle VM VirtualBox - addressed in versions 5.2.32, 6.0.10
MySQL Connectors - update to 8.0.18
file (Alpine package) - update to 5.36-r1
Contrail Networking - update to R22.3
compat-openssl10 - addressed in versions 1.0.2o-7.fc29, 1.0.2o-7.fc30, 1.0.2o-8.fc31
Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery - update to 18.1.1.2-8

External References

Related Security Bulletins