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Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:25:24 +0100
From: Richard Moore <rich@...tpoint.ltd.uk>
To: Jan Lieskovsky <jlieskov@...hat.com>, 
 "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...us.mitre.org>,
 oss-security <oss-security@...ts.openwall.com>, 
 Simon Ward <simon@...tpoint.ltd.uk>
Subject: Re: CVE Request 1, NSS 2, Qt: Doesn't handle wildcards
 in Common Name properly

On 04/09/2010 14:37, Joe Orton wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 06:20:49PM +0200, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
>>    1, Network Security Services (NSS) handled wildcard (*) character
>>       in the Common Name field of a x509v3 digital certificate.
>>       If an attacker is able to get a carefully-crafted certificate,
>>       signed by a Certificate Authority trusted by Firefox, the attacker
>>       could use the certificate during the man-in-the-middle attack and
>>       potentially confuse Firefox into accepting it by mistake. Different
>>       vulnerability than CVE-2009-2408.
>
> I would suspect that many of the usual raft of OpenSSL-based apps with
> hand-crafted cert identity checks will be vulnerable to this too, where
> wildcard certs are supported.

We did try some other openssl based apps but most had either no
wildcard support, no real CN validation, or wildcard support that
use the old-style shell-globs which is much worse anyway. Unlike NSS
openssl doesn't provide a function for performing CN validation
which means that apps have generally rolled their own (poor)
implementations.

Cheers

Rich.

>
> Regards, Joe
>
>


-- 
Richard Moore, Principal Software Engineer,
Westpoint Ltd,
Albion Wharf, 19 Albion Street, Manchester, M1 5LN, England
Tel: +44 161 237 1028
Fax: +44 161 237 1031

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