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Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2015-71

NSS incorrectly permits skipping of ServerKeyExchange

Announced
July 2, 2015
Reporter
Karthikeyan Bhargavan
Impact
Moderate
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR, Firefox OS, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
Fixed in
  • Firefox 39
  • Firefox ESR 31.8
  • Firefox ESR 38.1
  • Firefox OS 2.2
  • SeaMonkey 2.35
  • Thunderbird 31.8
  • Thunderbird 38.1

Description

Security researcher Karthikeyan Bhargavan reported an issue in Network Security Services (NSS) where the client allows for a ECDHE_ECDSA exchange where the server does not send its ServerKeyExchange message instead of aborting the handshake. Instead, the NSS client will take the EC key from the ECDSA certificate. This violates the TLS protocol and also has some security implications for forward secrecy. In this situation, the browser thinks it is engaged in an ECDHE exchange, but has been silently downgraded to a non-forward secret mixed-ECDH exchange instead. As a result, if False Start is enabled, the browser will start sending data encrypted under these non-forward-secret connection keys. This issue was fixed in NSS version 3.19.1.

References