Incident: A local patch nobody upstream reviewed

Module 13 · Incident file · About 35 minutes

What happened

On 13 May 2008 the Debian project published security advisory DSA-1571: "the random number generator in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable" (Debian, DSA-1571-1, 13 May 2008). OpenSSL is the encryption library behind much of the internet; Debian, a Linux distribution, ships its own packaged copy of it, with local changes.

The advisory dates the problem: the first vulnerable version "was uploaded to the unstable distribution on 2006-09-17", and spread to Debian's stable release. That is about 20 months. The cost was not a bill but a clean-up across every affected machine. Debian "strongly recommended" that all key material generated on those systems "is recreated from scratch", and that DSA keys ever used on them "should be considered compromised". The list included SSH, OpenVPN and DNSSEC keys and certificate keys. Systems that did not run Debian could still be affected "if weak keys are imported into them".