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

gnupg -- OpenPGP symmetric encryption vulnerability

Affected packages
gnupg < 1.4.1
p5-Crypt-OpenPGP <= 1.03
3.0 <= pgp

Details

VuXML ID 8375a73f-01bf-11da-bc08-0001020eed82
Discovery 2005-02-08
Entry 2005-07-31
Modified 2007-04-23

Serge Mister and Robert Zuccherato reports that the OpenPGP protocol is vulnerable to a cryptographic attack when using symmetric encryption in an automated way.

David Shaw reports about the impact:

This attack, while very significant from a cryptographic point of view, is not generally effective in the real world. To be specific, unless you have your OpenPGP program set up as part of an automated system to accept encrypted messages, decrypt them, and then provide a response to the submitter, then this does not affect you at all.

Note that the fix in GnuPG does note completely eliminate the potential problem:

These patches disable a portion of the OpenPGP protocol that the attack is exploiting. This change should not be user visible. With the patch in place, this attack will not work using a public-key encrypted message. It will still work using a passphrase-encrypted message.

References

CERT/CC Vulnerability Note 303094
CVE Name CVE-2005-0366
URL http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/033
URL http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2005q1/000191.html
URL http://www.pgp.com/newsroom/ctocorner/openpgp.html