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perl-Crypt-DSA: improperly secure randomness

Package(s):perl-Crypt-DSA CVE #(s):CVE-2011-3599
Created:September 13, 2013 Updated:September 26, 2013
Description:

From the Fedora advisory:

As taught by the '09 Debian PGP disaster relating to DSA, the randomness source is extremely important. On systems without /dev/random, Crypt::DSA falls back to using Data::Random. Data::Random uses rand(), about which the perldoc says "rand() is not cryptographically secure. You should not rely on it in security-sensitive situations." In the case of DSA, this is even worse. Using improperly secure randomness sources can compromise the signing key upon signature of a message.

See: http://rdist.root.org/2010/11/19/dsa-requirements-for-random-k-value/

It might seem that this would not affect Linux since /dev/random is always available and so the fall back to Data::Random would never happen. However, if an application is confined using a MAC system such as SELinux then access to /dev/random could be denied by policy and the fall back would be triggered.

Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2013-15786 2013-09-13
Fedora FEDORA-2013-15755 2013-09-13
Mageia MGASA-2013-0289 2013-09-24
Mandriva MDVSA-2013:241 2013-09-25

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perl-Crypt-DSA: improperly secure randomness

Posted Sep 26, 2013 10:23 UTC (Thu) by robbe (subscriber, #16131) [Link]

> '09 Debian PGP disaster

What kind of Noodle Incident is meant here?

Did I miss any major news back then, or should s/PGP/OpenSSL/ be applied?

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