OpenSSL fixes serious flaw that could enable man-in-the-middle attacks

A flaw in the widely used OpenSSL library could allow man-in-the-middle attackers to impersonate HTTPS servers and snoop on encrypted traffic. Most browsers are not affected, but other applications and embedded devices could be.

The OpenSSL 1.0.1p and 1.0.2d versions released Thursday fix an issue that could be used to bypass certain checks and trick OpenSSL to treat any valid certificates as belonging to certificate authorities. Attackers could exploit this to generate rogue certificates for any website that would be accepted by OpenSSL.

“This vulnerability is really only useful to an active attacker, who is already capable of performing a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, either locally or upstream from the victim,” said Tod Beardsley, security engineering manager at Rapid7, via email. “This limits the feasibility of attacks to actors who are already in a privileged position on one of the hops between the client and the server, or is on the same LAN and can impersonate DNS or gateways.”

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