November 15, 2009, 4:00 pm
A design flaw has been found in the TLS and SSL protocol that allows an attacker to inject arbitrary content at the beginning of a TLS/SSL connection. The attack is related to the way how TLS and SSL handle session renegotiations. CVE-2009-3555 has been assigned to this vulnerability.
As a partial mitigation against this attack, this apache2 update disables client-initiated renegotiations. This should fix the vulnerability for the majority of Apache configurations in use.
NOTE: This is not a complete fix for the problem. The attack is still possible in configurations where the server initiates the renegotiation. This is the case for the following configurations (the information in the changelog of the updated packages is slightly inaccurate):
- The “SSLVerifyClient” directive is used in a Directory or Location context.
- The “SSLCipherSuite” directive is used in a Directory or Location context…
