TALOS-2018-0758 SSL CRL distribution points Denial of Service

Warning

This resource is maintained for historical reference and does not contain the latest vulnerability info for Python.

The canonical database for vulnerabilities affecting Python is available on GitHub in the Open Source Vulnerability (OSV) format. This vulnerability can be viewed online at the Open Source Vulnerability Database.

An exploitable denial-of-service vulnerability exists in the X509 certificate parser of Python.org Python 2.7.11 / 3.6.6. A specially crafted X509 certificate can cause a NULL pointer dereference, resulting in a denial of service. An attacker can initiate or accept TLS connections using crafted certificates to trigger this vulnerability.

Christian Heimes added the following comment.

The bug is less critical and harder to exploit than I initially thought. td;dr if you have cert validation enabled and only trust public root CAs from CA/B forum, then you are not affected.

The bug is only exploitable under two conditions:

  1. The user has disabled TLS/SSL certificate validation and calls getpeercert() in 3rd party code.
  2. Or the user trusts a CA that does not properly validate end-entity certificates.

When cert validation is enabled, the ssl module will refuse any untrusted certificate during the handshake. The SSLSocket.getpeercert() and SSLObject.getpeercert() methods raise an exception, when the handshake was not successful. Python 2.7 - 3.6 hostname verification code only calls getpeercert() after the cert chain was validated successfully. Python 3.7+ no longer calls getpeercert() for hostname verification. Further more hostname verification can’t be enabled when cert validation is disabled.

For publicly trusted CAs governed by CA/B baseline requirements, CRL DPs must by valid URI general names with HTTP links. From CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements Version 1.6.2, December 10, 2018, section 7.1.2.3. Subscriber Certificate:

  1. cRLDistributionPoints

This extension MAY be present. If present, it MUST NOT be marked critical, and it MUST contain the HTTP URL of the CA’s CRL service.

Patch by Christian Heimes.

Dates:

  • Disclosure date: 2019-01-15 (Python issue bpo-35746 reported)
  • Reported at: 2019-01-15
  • Reported by: Colin Read and Nicolas Edet of Cisco.

Fixed In

Python issue

[ssl][CVE-2019-5010] TALOS-2018-0758 Denial of Service.

  • Python issue: bpo-35746
  • Creation date: 2019-01-15
  • Reporter: Cisco Talos

CVE-2019-5010

An exploitable denial-of-service vulnerability exists in the X509 certificate parser of Python.org Python 2.7.11 / 3.6.6. A specially crafted X509 certificate can cause a NULL pointer dereference, resulting in a denial of service. An attacker can initiate or accept TLS connections using crafted certificates to trigger this vulnerability.

Timeline

Timeline using the disclosure date 2019-01-15 as reference: