LibreSSL PRNG Vulnerability Patched 151
msm1267 writes: The OpenBSD project late last night rushed out a patch for a vulnerability in the LibreSSL pseudo random number generator (PRNG). The flaw was disclosed two days ago by the founder of secure backup company Opsmate, Andrew Ayer, who said the vulnerability was a "catastrophic failure of the PRNG." OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt and developer Bob Beck, however, countered saying that the issue is "overblown" because Ayer's test program is unrealistic. Ayer's test program, when linked to LibreSSL and made two different calls to the PRNG, returned the exact same data both times.
"It is actually only a problem with the author's contrived test program," Beck said. "While it's a real issue, it's actually a fairly minor one, because real applications don't work the way the author describes, both because the PID (process identification number) issue would be very difficult to have become a real issue in real software, and nobody writes real software with OpenSSL the way the author has set this test up in the article."
"It is actually only a problem with the author's contrived test program," Beck said. "While it's a real issue, it's actually a fairly minor one, because real applications don't work the way the author describes, both because the PID (process identification number) issue would be very difficult to have become a real issue in real software, and nobody writes real software with OpenSSL the way the author has set this test up in the article."
Re:This is not how you inspire confidence (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Grandparent initializes SSL state, sends some data, then exits.
2. Parent forks a child
3. Child happens to get the same pid as the grandparent, and then uses the SSL connection.
It's a program structure that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the real world. Maybe it has happened somewhere.
The big issue is that the original discoverer found an easily filled molehill and somehow it got reported as a world destroying volcano across the the various tech sites. A minor flaw in the first public release of the test version of a library with no production users is not "catastrophic".
Re:This is not how you inspire confidence (Score:2, Interesting)
His point was obviously that you couldn't accidentally write a program to exploit the flaw and that this exploit does not mean that all software using OpenSSL is vulnerable to the exploit as was the case with heartbleed. In fact, this flaw only means that your encryption is weak if you 1) decide to use LibreSSL in your software and 2) decide to intentionally break LibreSSL in your software. The end result is then weak encryption.
Shocked I am! Shocked! (Score:2, Interesting)
IKR.
There's a lot of people saying its a non-issue. It's a huge issue. The contract of a PRNG says it's to return a random value. Getting it to do otherwise (without providing the same seed) is tantamount to being able to make a collision in a hash function (in terms of severity) -- which means that it's fundamentally broken. This bug indicates that there is some underlying structural issue with this PRNG's initialization, and downplaying it demonstrates incompetence.
Re:This is not how you inspire confidence (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought they did quite well.
Re:This is not how you inspire confidence (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm of the opinion that it should crash hard and loundly if it can't open a system PRNG of some sort.
I think If "fix your OS" is the OpenBSD approach to broken OSs (rather thantrying to work around) then "fix your sysadmin" should surely be the approach to broken sysadmins.