OpenSSL patched two vulnerabilities of which one was rated ‘high severity’.
“The more urgent of the two patches addresses a flaw introduced in OpenSSL 1.0.2 providing support for generating X9.42 style Diffie-Hellman parameters. Previously, these parameters were generated using only “safe” prime numbers, but OpenSSL said today in its advisory that primes used in X9.42 parameter files may not be safe”, explained Threatpost.
The post also said that the other vulnerability which is less severe allows an attacker to pull of a client-side hack by negotiating weaker SSLv2 ciphers.
“OpenSSL provides the option SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE for ephemeral DH (DHE) in TLS. It is not on by default,” said the advisory from OpenSSL. “If the option is not set then the server reuses the same private DH exponent for the life of the server process and would be vulnerable to this attack.”
“The project team also said the upgraded crypto strength for the Logjam mitigation now allows for the rejection of handshakes with Diffie Hellman parameters shorter than 768 bits”.
“This limit has been increased to 1024 bits in this release, to offer stronger cryptographic assurance for all TLS connections using ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange,” OpenSSL said.
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