Is the vulnerability CVE-2017-11462 applicable to older MIT Kerberos 5 releases?

Greg Hudson ghudson at mit.edu
Sun Dec 3 13:22:18 EST 2017


On 12/03/2017 05:10 AM, Sergey Emantayev wrote:
> We're using a 3rd party software integrated with the MIT Kerberos 5 library version 1.9.1. This is used to communicate to MS Active Directory in Linux. I found a fix is available for the latest versions 1.13, 1.14, 1.15: http://krbdev.mit.edu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=8598. However should we apply (back port) the fix to our library 1.9.1? I know that they made few patches in the original MIT Kerberos code, I'm in doubt about an upgrade option.

The accept_sec_context part of the change affects 1.9, but the
init_sec_context part does not.

You may also be able to ignore this CVE, if your application correctly
uses the GSS-API.  An exploitable vulnerability only arises when an
application incorrectly uses gss_init_sec_context() or
gss_accept_sec_context().  This was a weird case where we assigned a CVE
based on conformant but less-than-ideally-safe API behavior, because we
knew it had contributed to a vulnerability in at least one caller.


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