PolarSSL Security Advisory 2014-03

Title

POODLE attack on SSLv3

CVE

CVE-2014-3566

Date

16th of October 2014

Affects

The SSL v3 protocol

Not affected

TLS 1.0 and up

Impact

Potential disclosure of information

Exploit

Active Man-in-the-Middle required

On October the 14th a paper was released on the so-called POODLE attack on SSLv3.

This Security Advisory only describes the impact and workaround for the POODLE attack. A more detailed explanation can be found in our post that puts the POODLE attack in perspective.

Impact of POODLE

The POODLE attack assumes that the attacker is successful in actively manipulating the packets of the handshake between the client and the server, resulting in a downgraded SSL v3 connection.

If the attacker is then able to actively manipulate packets sent during the connection, the impact can be leakage of secret information, such as the session cookie in HTTPS.

For a lot of protocols other than HTTPS there is no real impact as there is nothing to reveal that is session bound and not incidental.

Workaround and resolution

PolarSSL allows you to disable SSLv3 at compile time and at runtime.

If you disable POLARSSL_SSL_PROTO_SSL3 in config.h , support for SSLv3 is not compiled into your library.

At runtime you can call:

ssl_set_min_version( ssl, SSL_MAJOR_VERSION_3, SSL_MINOR_VERSION_1 );

This forces your SSL context to only negotiate TLS 1.0 or higher.