nettle: Information disclosure — GLSA 201706-21

A cache-related side channel vulnerability was found in nettle which might allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information.

Affected packages

dev-libs/nettle on all architectures
Affected versions < 3.2-r1
Unaffected versions >= 3.2-r1

Background

Nettle is a cryptographic library that is designed to fit easily in almost any context: In cryptographic toolkits for object-oriented languages, such as C++, Python, or Pike, in applications like lsh or GnuPG, or even in kernel space.

Description

It was found that nettle’s RSA and DSA decryption code was vulnerable to cache-related side channel attacks.

See the referenced technical paper “Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud” below for details.

Impact

An attacker could recover the private key from a co-located virtual-machine instance.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All nettle users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-libs/nettle-3.2-r1"
 

References

Release date
June 22, 2017

Latest revision
June 22, 2017: 1

Severity
normal

Exploitable
local, remote

Bugzilla entries