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Commit 259b664f authored by Emilia Kasper's avatar Emilia Kasper
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CVE-2016-0798: avoid memory leak in SRP



The SRP user database lookup method SRP_VBASE_get_by_user had confusing
memory management semantics; the returned pointer was sometimes newly
allocated, and sometimes owned by the callee. The calling code has no
way of distinguishing these two cases.

Specifically, SRP servers that configure a secret seed to hide valid
login information are vulnerable to a memory leak: an attacker
connecting with an invalid username can cause a memory leak of around
300 bytes per connection.

Servers that do not configure SRP, or configure SRP but do not configure
a seed are not vulnerable.

In Apache, the seed directive is known as SSLSRPUnknownUserSeed.

To mitigate the memory leak, the seed handling in SRP_VBASE_get_by_user
is now disabled even if the user has configured a seed.

Applications are advised to migrate to SRP_VBASE_get1_by_user. However,
note that OpenSSL makes no strong guarantees about the
indistinguishability of valid and invalid logins. In particular,
computations are currently not carried out in constant time.

Reviewed-by: default avatarRich Salz <rsalz@openssl.org>
parent 64333004
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