Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-21029 - Improper Certificate Validation vulnerability in multiple products
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
NONE Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
systemd 239 through 245 accepts any certificate signed by a trusted certificate authority for DNS Over TLS. Server Name Indication (SNI) is not sent, and there is no hostname validation with the GnuTLS backend. NOTE: This has been disputed by the developer as not a vulnerability since hostname validation does not have anything to do with this issue (i.e. there is no hostname to be sent)
Vulnerable Configurations
Part | Description | Count |
---|---|---|
Application | 12 | |
OS | 1 |
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Creating a Rogue Certificate Authority Certificate An attacker exploits a weakness in the MD5 hash algorithm (weak collision resistance) to generate a certificate signing request (CSR) that contains collision blocks in the "to be signed" part. The attacker specially crafts two different, but valid X.509 certificates that when hashed with the MD5 algorithm would yield the same value. The attacker then sends the CSR for one of the certificates to the Certification Authority which uses the MD5 hashing algorithm. That request is completely valid and the Certificate Authority issues an X.509 certificate to the attacker which is signed with its private key. An attacker then takes that signed blob and inserts it into another X.509 certificate that the attacker generated. Due to the MD5 collision, both certificates, though different, hash to the same value and so the signed blob works just as well in the second certificate. The net effect is that the attackers' second X.509 certificate, which the Certification Authority has never seen, is now signed and validated by that Certification Authority. To make the attack more interesting, the second certificate could be not just a regular certificate, but rather itself a signing certificate. Thus the attacker is able to start their own Certification Authority that is anchored in its root of trust in the legitimate Certification Authority that has signed the attackers' first X.509 certificate. If the original Certificate Authority was accepted by default by browsers, so will now the Certificate Authority set up by the attacker and of course any certificates that it signs. So the attacker is now able to generate any SSL certificates to impersonate any web server, and the user's browser will not issue any warning to the victim. This can be used to compromise HTTPS communications and other types of systems where PKI and X.509 certificates may be used (e.g., VPN, IPSec) .
Nessus
NASL family | Fedora Local Security Checks |
NASL id | FEDORA_2019-4C3CE3AA5C.NASL |
description | - Latest bugfix release. Systemd-stable snapshots will now be numbered. - Fix broken PrivateDevices filter on big-endian, s390x in particular (#1769148) - systemd-modules-load.service should only warn, not fail, on error (#1254340) - Fix incorrect certificate validation with DNS over TLS (#1771725, #1771726, CVE-2018-21029) - Fix regression with crypttab keys with colons - Various memleaks and minor memory access issues, warning adjustments No need to log out or reboot. Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora update system website. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues. |
last seen | 2020-06-01 |
modified | 2020-06-02 |
plugin id | 131168 |
published | 2019-11-21 |
reporter | This script is Copyright (C) 2019 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof. |
source | https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/131168 |
title | Fedora 31 : systemd (2019-4c3ce3aa5c) |
code |
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References
- https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/9397
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/dns-encryption-explained/
- https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v243/src/resolve/resolved-dnstls-gnutls.c#L62-L63
- https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191122-0002/
- https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/13870
- https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7858#section-4.1
- https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v239/man/resolved.conf.xml#L199-L207
- https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v243/man/resolved.conf.xml#L196-L207
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/4NLJVOJMB6ANDILRLDZK26YGLYBEPHKY/