Issued:

2013-01-23

Updated:

2013-01-23

RHSA-2013:0189 - Important: ipa-client security update

Synopsis

Important: ipa-client security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory Important

Topic

An updated ipa-client package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Description

Red Hat Identity Management is a centralized authentication, identity management and authorization solution for both traditional and cloud-based enterprise environments.

A weakness was found in the way IPA clients communicated with IPA servers when initially attempting to join IPA domains. As there was no secure way to provide the IPA server's Certificate Authority (CA) certificate to the client during a join, the IPA client enrollment process was susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. This flaw could allow an attacker to obtain access to the IPA server using the credentials provided by an IPA client, including administrative access to the entire domain if the join was performed using an administrator's credentials. (CVE-2012-5484)

Note: This weakness was only exposed during the initial client join to the realm, because the IPA client did not yet have the CA certificate of the server. Once an IPA client has joined the realm and has obtained the CA certificate of the IPA server, all further communication is secure. If a client were using the OTP (one-time password) method to join to the realm, an attacker could only obtain unprivileged access to the server (enough to only join the realm).

Red Hat would like to thank Petr Mensik for reporting this issue.

When a fix for this flaw has been applied to the client but not yet the server, ipa-client-install, in unattended mode, will fail if you do not have the correct CA certificate locally, noting that you must use the "--force" option to insecurely obtain the certificate. In interactive mode, the certificate will try to be obtained securely from LDAP. If this fails, you will be prompted to insecurely download the certificate via HTTP. In the same situation when using OTP, LDAP will not be queried and you will be prompted to insecurely download the certificate via HTTP.

Users of ipa-client are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which corrects this issue.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• ipa-client-debuginfo-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.ppc.rpm
• ipa-client-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.x86_64.rpm
• ipa-client-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.ia64.rpm
• ipa-client-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.i386.rpm
• ipa-client-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.s390x.rpm
• ipa-client-debuginfo-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.i386.rpm
• ipa-client-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.ppc.rpm
• ipa-client-debuginfo-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.ia64.rpm
• ipa-client-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.src.rpm
• ipa-client-debuginfo-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.x86_64.rpm
• ipa-client-debuginfo-2.1.3-5.el5_9.2.s390x.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 876307

CVEs

• CVE-2012-5484

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#important

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.