[Bug 1187195] [NEW] OpenSSL site-wide compression disable tracking bug

[Seth Arnold]

*** This bug is a security vulnerability ***

Public security bug reported:

This bug is a tracking bug for OpenSSL patches that introduce a new
environment variable OPENSSL_DEFAULT_ZLIB that is necessary for re-
enabling compression on a per-application basis.

Many applications, such as Apache Webserver, Qt's wrappers, and others,
provide controls that can be used to configure if compression is
required, allowed, or forbidden.

This bug tracks an update to include a patch from Fedora,
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/openssl.git/plain/openssl-1.0.1e-env-
zlib.patch , that will disable OpenSSL's automatic compression for all
programs that do not have the OPENSSL_DEFAULT_ZLIB environment variable
defined. (Value does not matter.) This is necessary because some
programs, e.g. Postfix, do not have controls exposed to disable
compression.

I do not know if the compression-related SSL attacks even make sense for
SMTP, but some PCI-DSS auditors are flagging Postfix configurations with
this flaw. It is safer to turn off compression everywhere it is not
necessary.

** Affects: openssl (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1187195

Title:
  OpenSSL site-wide compression disable tracking bug

Status in “openssl” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  This bug is a tracking bug for OpenSSL patches that introduce a new
  environment variable OPENSSL_DEFAULT_ZLIB that is necessary for re-
  enabling compression on a per-application basis.

  Many applications, such as Apache Webserver, Qt's wrappers, and
  others, provide controls that can be used to configure if compression
  is required, allowed, or forbidden.

  This bug tracks an update to include a patch from Fedora,
  http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/openssl.git/plain/openssl-1.0.1e-
  env-zlib.patch , that will disable OpenSSL's automatic compression for
  all programs that do not have the OPENSSL_DEFAULT_ZLIB environment
  variable defined. (Value does not matter.) This is necessary because
  some programs, e.g. Postfix, do not have controls exposed to disable
  compression.

  I do not know if the compression-related SSL attacks even make sense
  for SMTP, but some PCI-DSS auditors are flagging Postfix
  configurations with this flaw. It is safer to turn off compression
  everywhere it is not necessary.

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