Fedora 18 : perl-Crypt-DSA-1.17-10.fc18 (2013-15755)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 69857

Synopsis

The remote Fedora host is missing a security update.

Description

As taught by the '09 Debian PGP disaster relating to DSA, the randomness source is extremely important. On systems without /dev/random, Crypt::DSA falls back to using Data::Random. Data::Random uses rand(), about which the perldoc says 'rand() is not cryptographically secure. You should not rely on it in security-sensitive situations.' In the case of DSA, this is even worse. Using improperly secure randomness sources can compromise the signing key upon signature of a message. See:
http://rdist.root.org/2010/11/19/dsa-requirements-for-random-k-value/ It might seem that this would not affect Linux since /dev/random is always available and so the fall back to Data::Random would never happen. However, if an application is confined using a MAC system such as SELinux then access to /dev/random could be denied by policy and the fall back would be triggered.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Solution

Update the affected perl-Crypt-DSA package.

See Also

https://rdist.root.org/2010/11/19/dsa-requirements-for-random-k-value/

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=743567

http://www.nessus.org/u?bf712e28

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 69857

File Name: fedora_2013-15755.nasl

Version: 1.5

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 9/13/2013

Updated: 1/11/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 2.7

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.8

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:N

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:fedoraproject:fedora:perl-crypt-dsa, cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:18

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list

Patch Publication Date: 9/4/2013

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2011-3599

FEDORA: 2013-15755