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Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2016 23:28:28 +0200
From: Florian Weimer <fw@...eb.enyo.de>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: NSPR 4.12, NSS 3.22.1 and PR_GetEnvSecure

* Florian Weimer:

> It seems this was never disclosed properly; there are still a couple
> of hidden Mozilla bugs about this.
>
> The NSS 3.22.1 announcement
>
>   <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/NSS/NSS_3.22.1_release_notes>
>
> mentions one:
>
>   bug 1194680: NSS has been changed to use the PR_GetEnvSecure
>     function that was made available in NSPR 4.12
>
> The story behind this is that NSS uses environment variables to
> configure lots of things, some of which refer to file system
> locations.  Others can be degrade the operation of NSS in various
> ways, forcing compatibility modes and so on.
>
> Previously, these environment variables were not ignored SUID
> binaries.  NSPR 4.12 and NSS 3.22.1 introduce a new API,
> PR_GetEnVSecure, to address this.  It's a very thin wrapper around
> glibc's secure_getenv and similar functions on other systems.
>
> Both NSPR and NSS need to be upgraded to address this; even if you run
> s/PR_GetEnvSecure/secure_getenv/ on the NSS sources, some unprotected
> environment variable lookups remain in NSPR.

Debian has released DSA-3687-1 and DSA-3688-1, explicitly mentioning
this as a security issue:

  <https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2016/msg00268.html>
  <https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2016/msg00269.html>

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