USN-3270-1: NSS vulnerabilities

Publication date

27 April 2017

Overview

Several security issues were fixed in NSS.


Packages

  • nss - Network Security Service library

Details

Karthik Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent discovered that the DES and Triple DES
ciphers were vulnerable to birthday attacks. A remote attacker could
possibly use this flaw to obtain clear text data from long encrypted
sessions. This update causes NSS to limit use of the same symmetric key.
(CVE-2016-2183)

It was discovered that NSS incorrectly handled Base64 decoding. A remote
attacker could use this flaw to cause NSS to crash, resulting in a denial
of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2017-5461)

This update refreshes the NSS package to version 3.28.4 which includes
the latest CA certificate bundle.

Karthik Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent discovered that the DES and Triple DES
ciphers were vulnerable to birthday attacks. A remote attacker could
possibly use this flaw to obtain clear text data from long encrypted
sessions. This update causes NSS to limit use of the same symmetric key.
(CVE-2016-2183)

It was discovered that NSS incorrectly handled Base64 decoding. A remote
attacker could use this flaw to cause NSS to crash, resulting in a denial
of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2017-5461)

This update refreshes the NSS package to version 3.28.4 which includes
the latest CA certificate bundle.

Update instructions

This update uses a new upstream release, which includes additional bug fixes. After a standard system update you need to restart any applications that use NSS, such as Evolution and Chromium, to make all the necessary changes.

Learn more about how to get the fixes.

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu Release Package Version
17.04 zesty libnss3 –  2:3.28.4-0ubuntu0.17.04.1
16.10 yakkety libnss3 –  2:3.28.4-0ubuntu0.16.10.1
16.04 xenial libnss3 –  2:3.28.4-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
14.04 trusty libnss3 –  2:3.28.4-0ubuntu0.14.04.1

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