On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Theo Van Dinter wrote:

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:32:32AM -0400, Brian A. Dewhirst wrote:

...

I'm afraid my head spins a bit when I try to make sense of what corrective measures should be taken... has Ubuntu already rolled out a bug fix which will take care of the problem? If not, what needs to be done to fix my machine?

In short if you've generated any keys with OpenSSL (ie: certificates, ssh keys, etc,) on Debian or its derivatives at anytime in at least the last 2 years, you will want to regenerate them after you upgrade to the fixed version.

Updating will solve the weak key generation issue, but not do anything about the already generated keys in use.

Well, pretend you're talking to a linux novice for a minute... does that mean that if I don't think I've done any cryptography that I'm fine, or is OpenSSL used for lots of other programs... for example, does Firefox use it when someone logs into their checking account?

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:39:51AM -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote:

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:32:32AM -0400, Brian A. Dewhirst wrote:

...

I'm afraid my head spins a bit when I try to make sense of what corrective measures should be taken... has Ubuntu already rolled out a bug fix which will take care of the problem? If not, what needs to be done to fix my machine?

In short if you've generated any keys with OpenSSL (ie: certificates, ssh keys, etc,) on Debian or its derivatives at anytime in at least the last 2 years, you will want to regenerate them after you upgrade to the fixed version.

Updating will solve the weak key generation issue, but not do anything about the already generated keys in use.

Also, if you've used SSH Password Authentication to log into to any system whose SSH host keys were generated with the vulnerable OpenSSL (likely any Debian, Ubuntu, or derivative systems), then you should change your password. Any data that was transferred over SSH to a system with a vulnerable key could have been compromised.