CVE-2020-1971 EDIPARTYNAME NULL pointer dereference

What is CVE-2020-1971?

CVE-2020-1971 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 8 Dec 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The X.509 GeneralName type is a generic type for representing different types of names. One of those name types is known as EDIPartyName. OpenSSL provides a function GENERAL_NAME_cmp which compares different instances of a GENERAL_NAME to see if they are equal or not. This function behaves incorrectly when both GENERAL_NAMEs contain an EDIPARTYNAME. A NULL pointer dereference and a crash may occur leading to a possible denial of service attack. OpenSSL itself uses the GENERAL_NAME_cmp function for two purposes: 1) Comparing CRL distribution point names between an available CRL and a CRL distribution point embedded in an X509 certificate 2) When verifying that a timestamp response token signer matches the timestamp authority name (exposed via the API functions TS_RESP_verify_response and TS_RESP_verify_token) If an attacker can control both items being compared then that attacker could trigger a crash. For example if the attacker can trick a client or server into checking a malicious certificate against a malicious CRL then this may occur. Note that some applications automatically download CRLs based on a URL embedded in a certificate. This checking happens prior to the signatures on the certificate and CRL being verified. OpenSSL's s_server, s_client and verify tools have support for the "-crl_download" option which implements automatic CRL downloading and this attack has been demonstrated to work against those tools. Note that an unrelated bug means that affected versions of OpenSSL cannot parse or construct correct encodings of EDIPARTYNAME. However it is possible to construct a malformed EDIPARTYNAME that OpenSSL's parser will accept and hence trigger this attack. All OpenSSL 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 versions are affected by this issue. Other OpenSSL releases are out of support and have not been checked. Fixed in OpenSSL 1.1.1i (Affected 1.1.1-1.1.1h). Fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.2x (Affected 1.0.2-1.0.2w).

Weakness: CWE-476

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-1971?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including node and node-min. It affects 44 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Netapp Active Iq Unified Manager, Netapp Aff A250 Firmware, Netapp Clustered Data Ontap Antivirus Connector, Netapp Data Ontap and 38 more.

How do I fix CVE-2020-1971?

Upgrade node to a fixed version for your release line: 10.23.1, 12.20.1, 14.15.4 or 15.5.0.

Is CVE-2020-1971 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1971 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

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All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as A-175147055, ALPINE-CVE-2020-1971, BIT-node-2020-1971, BIT-node-min-2020-1971, CLEANSTART-2026-JE67710, CLSA-2020-1608724134 and 36 more.