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

OpenSSL -- Certificate validation issue

Affected packages
openssl-devel < 3.0.1

Details

VuXML ID 0132ca5b-5d11-11ec-8be6-d4c9ef517024
Discovery 2021-12-14
Entry 2021-12-14

The OpenSSL project reports:

Invalid handling of X509_verify_cert() internal errors in libssl (Moderate)

Internally libssl in OpenSSL calls X509_verify_cert() on the client side to verify a certificate supplied by a server. That function may return a negative return value to indicate an internal error (for example out of memory). Such a negative return value is mishandled by OpenSSL and will cause an IO function (such as SSL_connect() or SSL_do_handshake()) to not indicate success and a subsequent call to SSL_get_error() to return the value SSL_ERROR_WANT_RETRY_VERIFY. This return value is only supposed to be returned by OpenSSL if the application has previously called SSL_CTX_set_cert_verify_callback(). Since most applications do not do this the SSL_ERROR_WANT_RETRY_VERIFY return value from SSL_get_error() will be totally unexpected and applications may not behave correctly as a result. The exact behaviour will depend on the application but it could result in crashes, infinite loops or other similar incorrect responses.

References

CVE Name CVE-2021-4044
URL https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20211214.txt