Vulnerability Note VU#734032

Apple Mac OS X Security Framework Secure Transport may not negotiate the best cipher available

Overview

Apple Mac OS X Security Framework Secure Transport may not negotiate the best cipher available. This vulnerability may allow traffic to be weakly encrypted.

I. Description

Secure Transport refers to Apple’s implementation of SSL and TLS that is used by Mac OS X to create secure connections over TCP/IP connections. According to Apple Security Update 2006-007:

Due to the order they are evaluated, it is possible for Secure Transport to use a cipher that provides no encryption or authentication when better ciphers are available. Applications using Secure Transport through CFNetwork, such as Safari, are not affected by this issue on systems with Security Update 2006-006 or later. This issue does not affect systems using Mac OS X v10.4.8 and later

II. Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to observe the plaintext of traffic believed to be securely encrypted.

III. Solution

Apply Apple Updates

This issue is addressed by Apple Security Update 2006-007.

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Notified	Date Updated
Apple Computer, Inc.	Vulnerable	29-Nov-2006

References

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304829
http://secunia.com/advisories/23155/

Credit

This issue was reported in Apple Security Update 2006-007. Apple credits Eric Cronin of gizmolabs for reporting this issue.

This document was written by Chris Taschner.

Other Information

Date Public:	2006-11-28
Date First Published:	2006-11-30
Date Last Updated:	2006-11-30
CERT Advisory:
CVE-ID(s):	CVE-2006-4407
NVD-ID(s):	CVE-2006-4407
US-CERT Technical Alerts:
Metric:	10.94
Document Revision:	10

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Produced 2006 by US-CERT, a government organization
Disclaimers and copyright information

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