GnuTLS 3.6.x before 3.6.13 uses incorrect cryptography for DTLS. The earliest affected version is 3.6.3 (2018-07-16) because of an error in a 2017-10-06 commit. The DTLS client always uses 32 0 bytes instead of a random value, and thus contributes no randomness to a DTLS negotiation. This breaks the security guarantees of the DTLS protocol.
Weakness
The product uses insufficiently random numbers or values in a security context that depends on unpredictable numbers.
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Gnutls |
Gnu |
3.6.3 (including) |
3.6.13 (excluding) |
Potential Mitigations
- Use a well-vetted algorithm that is currently considered to be strong by experts in the field, and select well-tested implementations with adequate length seeds.
- In general, if a pseudo-random number generator is not advertised as being cryptographically secure, then it is probably a statistical PRNG and should not be used in security-sensitive contexts.
- Pseudo-random number generators can produce predictable numbers if the generator is known and the seed can be guessed. A 256-bit seed is a good starting point for producing a “random enough” number.
References