FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

PuTTY and embedders (f.i., filezilla) -- biased RNG with NIST P521/ecdsa-sha2-nistp521 signatures permits recovering private key

Affected packages
0.68 <= putty < 0.81
0.68 <= putty-nogtk < 0.81
filezilla < 3.67.0

Details

VuXML ID 080936ba-fbb7-11ee-abc8-6960f2492b1d
Discovery 2024-04-01
Entry 2024-04-16

Simon Tatham reports:

ECDSA signatures using 521-bit keys (the NIST P521 curve, otherwise known as ecdsa-sha2-nistp521) were generated with biased random numbers. This permits an attacker in possession of a few dozen signatures to RECOVER THE PRIVATE KEY.

Any 521-bit ECDSA private key that PuTTY or Pageant has used to sign anything should be considered compromised.

Additionally, if you have any 521-bit ECDSA private keys that you've used with PuTTY, you should consider them to be compromised: generate new keys, and remove the old public keys from any authorized_keys files.

A second, independent scenario is that the adversary is an operator of an SSH server to which the victim authenticates (for remote login or file copy), [...] and the victim uses the same private key for SSH connections to other services operated by other entities. Here, the rogue server operator (who would otherwise have no way to determine the victim's private key) can derive the victim's private key, and then use it for unauthorized access to those other services. If the other services include Git services, then again it may be possible to conduct supply-chain attacks on software maintained in Git. This also affects, for example, FileZilla before 3.67.0, WinSCP before 6.3.3, TortoiseGit before 2.15.0.1, and TortoiseSVN through 1.14.6.

References

CVE Name CVE-2024-31497
URL https://filezilla-project.org/versions.php
URL https://git.tartarus.org/?h=c193fe9848f50a88a4089aac647fecc31ae96d27&p=simon/putty.git
URL https://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/putty-announce/2024/000038.html
URL https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-31497
URL https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/vuln-p521-bias.html