OpenSSL publishes updates
Well, in case you missed it, the renowned OpenSSL cryptographic toolkit – a free and open source software product that we’re guessing is installed somewhere between one and three orders of magnitude more widely than Log4J – also published updates this week.
OpenSSL 1.1.1m replaces 1.1.1l (those last characters are M-for-Mike and L-for-Lima), and OpenSSL 3.0.1 replaces 3.0.0.
In case you were wondering, the popular X.Y.Z versioning scheme used by OpenSSL 3 was introduced at least in part to avoid the confusion caused by the trailing letter in the earlier version “numbering” system. As for OpenSSL 2, there wasn’t one. Only the 1.1.1 and the 3.0 series are currently supported, so updating versions such as OpenSSL 1.0.x means jumping to 1.1.1m, or directly to the OpenSSL 3 series.
“Applications may not behave correctly”
The good news is that the OpenSSL 1.1.1m release notes don’t list any CVE-numbered bugs, suggesting that although this update is both desirable and important (OpenSSL releases are infrequent enough that you can assume they arrive with purpose), you probably don’t need to consider it critical just yet.
But those of you who have already moved forwards to OpenSSL 3 – and, like your tax return, it’s ultimately inevitable, and somehow a lot easier if you start sooner – should note that OpenSSL 3.0.1 patches a security risk dubbed CVE-2021-4044.
As far as we’re aware, there are no viable known exploits for this bug, but as the OpenSSL release notes point out:
[The error code that may be returned due to the bug] 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.
In theory, a precisely written application ought not to be dangerously vulnerable to this bug, which is caused by what we referred to in the headline as error conflation, which is really just a fancy way of saying, “We gave you the wrong result.”
Simply put, some internal errors in OpenSSL – a genuine but unlikely error, for example, such as running out of memory, or a flaw elsewhere in OpenSSL that provokes an error where there wasn’t one – don’t get reported correctly.
Instead of percolating back to your application precisely, these errors get “remapped” as they are passed back up the call chain in OpenSSL, where they ultimately show up as a completely different sort of error.
You can see a contrived but explanatory example of bugs of this sort in this code:
Bulletproof SSL and TLS: Understanding and Deploying SSL/TLS and PKI to Secure Servers and Web Applications
