RSAREF bug issues (was Re: Looking for "lease based popper access")

[Bennett Todd <bet () mordor net>]

1999-12-13-12:50:43 R. DuFresne:
> Has there been a patch released by the RSA folks to deal with it's recent
> failing?  The impact of the RSA buffer overflow is that it affects all
> applications built around it's core, this includes ssh, ssl enabled
> webservers, etc..  Yep all those aplications built with RSA are now
> exploitable, so, has a pacht been released that addresses this and allows
> folks to patch RSAREF then rebuild all the applications that use it?

I think this note deserves a few comments.

First off, yes, there has been a patch posted, the OpenBSD folks at least have
released a patch, and maybe other folks have too I don't know, and the RSADSI
folks have officially given permission to use this patch. RSADSI didn't
release a patch themselves; they aren't programmers, they're just lawyers
doing their day job of trying to prevent people from using good encryption.

Second, the bug in question only affects the RSAREF code if it can be invoked
in a hostile fashion; sufficient parm checking in the caller can protect this
bug against a remote exploit. So independantly the OpenSSH folks had fixed
their sshd so that this bug didn't end up producing an exploit for them.

Third, the bug is only known to exist in the RSAREF code, which is
known-bad code. RSADSI forces people within the US who want to use RSA for
non-commercial purposes to use RSAREF. They sell a closed-source, proprietary
BSAFE lib, which may or may not have similar problems (I'd guess it does,
since they're not programmers). Most commercial secure web servers sold in the
US are probably linked against BSAFE rather than RSAREF, so they may or may
not be at risk, and then only if the SSL invoking code happens to be willing
to pass the problem through the the library.

And the RSA implementation in OpenSSL doesn't have this problem. Of course
it may be a patent violation to use that RSA within the US for some purposes
until Sep. 29, 2000.

The above are all "to the best of my knowlege", but I figured I'd let all my
ignorance hang out here, if I'm wrong on any of I'm sure I'll get corrected
fast in this forum:-).

-Bennett

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