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Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2014 13:02:51 -0500 (EST)
From: cve-assign@...re.org
To: mmcallis@...hat.com
Cc: cve-assign@...re.org, oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE needed for libotr's support for OTR v1?

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> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=725779

> as you are surely aware of, it's been known since 2006 that
> clients supporting both OTRv1 and v2 (such as libotr 3.x) are subject
> to protocol downgrade attacks clients. It's also been known for
> a while that OTRv1 has serious security issues

There may be multiple perspectives on this, but it might be preferable
to cover these "serious security issues" with CVEs that are about the
OTRv1 protocol itself, and not specifically about protocol downgrade
attacks. If the vulnerabilities in the OTRv1 protocol were completely
resolved (perhaps this is, in practice, essentially impossible), then
the downgrade would probably not be considered a security problem.
That would mean that a separate CVE assignment would not be made,
because of the lack of an independent vulnerability.

Occasionally a vendor who is the original author of software chooses
to describe a protocol-downgrade issue as a software mistake,
requiring a CVE, such as CVE-2013-0013 and CVE-2013-1654. In other
cases, a protocol-downgrade capability was an intentional aspect of a
design, and had some importance for compatibility, but became
problematic once the earlier protocol was documented as insecure. In
that case, preventing a downgrade could be seen as a security
enhancement.

- -- 
CVE assignment team, MITRE CVE Numbering Authority
M/S M300
202 Burlington Road, Bedford, MA 01730 USA
[ PGP key available through http://cve.mitre.org/cve/request_id.html ]
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