IETF completed the SSL vulnerability fix in January this year and now in August – 10 months after the original release of the flaw – Microsoft has stepped up and fixed it.

The fix is labeled as MS10-049 and categorised as a Critical security vulnerability. Interestingly it also notes that it fixes both a publicly exposed vulnerability and a privately reported bug both in the Secure Channel (SChannel) security package in Windows.

Microsoft has updated a broad swath of products to fix a potentially serious spoofing vulnerability in the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol that secures email, web transactions and other sensitive internet traffic.

The software company on Tuesday released MS10-049 to kill the bug in Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and 12 other versions of Windows that are still under support. The patch updates a part of the operating system known as SChannel, or Secure Channel, which is responsible for implementing SSL, which is also referred to as TLS, or transport layer security.

The weakness first became public in November, when word leaked out that a vulnerability in the underlying protocol used by hundreds of companies allowed attackers to inject text into encrypted traffic passing between two endpoints. Researchers had been meeting in secret to develop an industry-wide fix before attackers could figure out a way to exploit it.

Microsoft’s update follows the revision in January of RFC 5246, the request-for-comments document that previously mapped out the technical specifications for the protocol. The new controlling blueprint for SSL/TLS communications is RFC 5746. Since then, other packages, including OpenSSL, RedHat Linux and Oracle’s Java, have also been patched.

The vulnerability is pretty widespread as it covers both Windows 7 – their latest OS and 12 other versions of Windows which Microsoft still supports. It’s marked as critical on 5 versions of Windows, which means it allows remote code execution and the rest it’s marked as important as it allows spoofing.

I’m guessing most large corporates running Windows systems will be pushing out this patch ASAP, especially those that rely on SSL for daily business – those in eCommerce would be the likeliest to find this kind of attack a real risk.

“Ten months after public disclosure the majority of the industry has a fix,” said Marsh Ray, a software developer at two-factor authentication service PhoneFactor and one of the researchers who first sounded the alarm. “I think it’s about as good a time as any to declare victory on that project.”

Microsoft rated the severity of the vulnerability as “important,” the second-highest classification on its four-tier scale. The bulletin correctly said the SSL vulnerability could be exploited only in concert with another attack – such as ARP spoofing or DNS cache poisoning – that allowed someone to perform a man-in-the-middle attack.

“It is important to note that this is still potentially a significant issue for certain deployments, and the update should be installed,” Maarten Van Horenbeeck, a program manager in the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote here. “In particular, the vulnerability may affect other non-HTTP protocols that are less well understood.”

The vulnerability in the older protocol stems from the ability for either party in an SSL transaction to renegotiate the session, usually so one of them can refresh its cryptographic keys or change other parameters. That could allow man-in-the-middle attackers to surreptitiously introduce text at the beginning of an SSL session.

The latest Patch Tuesday from Microsoft has been a bit of a record breaker with 14 security patches for at least 34 separate vulnerabilities.

This closely follows more disclosed bugs in Adobe PDF related products following their latest patches for other critical rated vulnerabilities.

Source: The Register

A fairly serious flaw that was announced in October 2008 by Outpost24 (and apparently discovered way back in 2005), has finally been patched by the major players Cisco and Microsoft.

So far Redhat has offered a workaround for the flaw and Juniper has responded that their equipment is not vulnerable.

It could be that Juniper doesn’t really understand the attack yet, if so that’s bad news as most of the Internet backbone (ISP Level) runs on Juniper equipment.

Microsoft and Cisco have issued updates that protect against a new class of attack that requires very little bandwidth and can leave servers and routers paralyzed even after a flood of malicious data has stopped.

The bug in the TCP, or transmission control protocol, was disclosed in October by security researchers Jack Louis and Robert E. Lee of Sweden-based Outpost24. It gave many security watchers pause because it provided attackers with a new way to launch potentially crippling attacks on a wide array of equipment used to route traffic over the internet.

“This is definitely momentum and other vendors, once they fully understand what has been talked about here, will come up with mitigation strategies of their own,” Lee told The Register. “This really is good progress from both Microsoft and Cisco.”

Microsoft rolled it out in their normal “Patch Tuesday” fashion and Cisco issued a bulletin about especially disruptive DoS attacks.

Good to see it being addressed finally, I guess it took Microsoft some time and money in R&D to come up with a satisfactory solution.

I wonder if any other vendors will be following suite shortly.

On Tuesday, Microsoft responded with MS09-048, a security advisory that fixes a variety of networking vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems, including those discovered by Louis and Lee. The update implements a new feature called memory pressure protection, which automatically drops existing TCP connections and SYN requests when attacks are detected.

The update from Microsoft came during the company’s Patch Tuesday, in which it fixed a total of eight security vulnerabilities in various versions of its Windows operating system. In all, Microsoft issued five patches, which change the way Windows processes javascript, MP3 audio files and wireless signals. As always, the Sans Institute provides a helpful overview here.

Cisco issued it’s own bulletin warning that multiple products are vulnerable to DoS, or denial-of-service attacks that can be especially disruptive.

It’s often hard to fix problems like this in core components because a band-aid solution could end up breaking some of the functionality, especially with something like the TCP stack which is relied on so heavily.

Even then, a patch is released but how many people actually apply it? Cisco equipment is well known for being hard to manage/patch so I’d imagine many network devices will remain unpatched.

Source: The Register

There’s been quite a few Microsoft related exploits recently, but not in Windows, people have moved their focus towards the application layer and the top of the OSI stack.

This time it was a 0-day Vulnerability in Microsoft Word.

The original news comes from SANS Internet Storm Center Diary (ISC).

Microsoft has reported Word 2003, Word 2002, Word 2000 and Word Viewer 2003 are reportedly affected.

The vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, the malicious document is called QUESTION.DOC.

Password stealing Trojan spreads with this vulnerability, link to the McAfee PWS-Agent.g writeup.

US-CERT reported today that “Word fails to properly handle malformed data structures allowing memory corruption to occur”. This vulnerability is public CVE-2006-6456 now.