oss-security - Re: GnuTLS CVE-2009-2730 Patches

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Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:14:48 +0200
From: Simon Josefsson <simon@...efsson.org>
To: Jamie Strandboge <jamie@...onical.com>
Cc: gnutls-devel@....org, oss-security@...ts.openwall.com,
        Jeff Cai <Jeff.Cai@....COM>
Subject: Re: GnuTLS CVE-2009-2730 Patches

Jamie Strandboge <jamie-Z7WLFzj8eWMS+FvcfC7Uqw@...lic.gmane.org> writes:

> On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>> I don't have time/resources to produce releases for older branches.  If
>> someone else wants to volunteer to work on fixing older releases, that
>> would be appreciated.
>> 
>
> Attached are preliminary patches for 2.4.1, 2.0.4 and 1.2.9 backported
> from the advisory[1].

Thank you!

I have applied the 2.4.x patch on the gnutls_2_4_x branch, so it will be
built and tested by the daily autobuilder from now on.  I've tested that
the nul-in-x509-names self-test works as expected with the 2.4 library.
So in theory, it should be easy for me to make a v2.4.4 release from
that branch.  I wonder if this would helps anyone, though?  I'd imagine
that most people concerned with older releases are distributions that
have to support older GnuTLS releases.  And you aren't likely to use a
new upstream release anyway, since you just apply the patches to your
version.

I'm also concerned that there have been plenty of _other_ serious
problems in these old GnuTLS releases (check the security vulnerability
page), and I haven't back-ported the fixes to those problems to these
old branches.  So if I make a release on that branch, I'd have to check
what other serious problems would needs to be fixed for that branch to
be secure -- which sounds like real work (for little gain).

For these two reasons, I'd prefer to help you establish trust in the
patches you developed rather than make releases on old branches.

I also added a link to your post on
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/security.html> so others can find it
easily.

/Simon

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