Enterprise

Security pros breathe sigh of relief after new OpenSSL flaws less severe than feared

The bugs feature a “high” severity rating, down from the initial “critical” rating, and estimates suggest just 1.5% of OpenSSL instances are impacted.

Illustration of a man holding a magnifying glass up to an insect in laptop

A pre-announcement last week of a new vulnerability had generated significant attention in the cybersecurity community due to the ubiquity of OpenSSL and the massive impact of the Heartbleed vulnerability of 2014.

Illustration: uniquepixel/iStock/Getty Images Plus

The team that maintains OpenSSL, a key piece of widely used open-source software that’s used to provide encryption for internet communications, disclosed a pair of vulnerabilities on Tuesday that affect the most recent version of the software.

However, after initially rating the vulnerabilities as “critical” in a heads-up advisory last week, the new vulnerabilities have been downgraded to a severity rating of “high,” though administrators are still being urged to patch systems quickly.

The OpenSSL project team disclosed last week that a new vulnerability would be announced on Nov. 1 but did not provide specifics. The announcement had generated significant attention in the cybersecurity community due to the ubiquity of OpenSSL and the massive impact of a previously disclosed critical vulnerability in the software, the Heartbleed vulnerability of 2014.

OpenSSL enables secure internet communications by providing the underlying technology for the HTTPS protocol, now used on 82% of page loads worldwide, according to Firefox . The Heartbleed vulnerability had affected a significant number of major websites and led to attacks including the theft of hundreds of social insurance numbers in Canada, which prompted the shutdown of a tax filing website for the Canada Revenue Agency.

The vulnerability only impacts OpenSSL versions 3.0 and above. Data from cybersecurity vendor Wiz suggests that just 1.5% of OpenSSL instances are affected by the vulnerability.

That’s due at least in part to the relatively recent arrival of OpenSSL 3.0, which was released in September 2021.

“[Given] the fact the vulnerability is primarily client-side, requires the malicious certificate to be signed by a trusted CA (or the user to ignore the warning), and is complex to exploit, I estimate a low chance of seeing in-the-wild exploitation,” security researcher Marcus Hutchins wrote in a post .

The new version of OpenSSL featuring the patch for the vulnerability is OpenSSL 3.0.7 .

The pre-announcement on the new version last week was presumably to give organizations time to determine if their applications would be impacted before disclosing the full details on the vulnerabilities, said Brian Fox, co-founder and CTO of software supply chain security vendor Sonatype.

Given the tendency for malicious actors to quickly utilize major vulnerabilities in cyberattacks, many expected that attackers would begin seeking to exploit the issue shortly after the disclosure.

The new vulnerabilities both involve buffer overflow issues, a common bug in software code that can enable an attacker to gain unauthorized access to parts of memory.

In the first vulnerability disclosed on Tuesday, which has been given the tracker CVE-2022-3602, “An attacker can craft a malicious email address to overflow four attacker-controlled bytes on the stack,” the OpenSSL team wrote in the advisory on the issue.

The resulting buffer overflow could lead to a crash or, potentially, remote execution of code, the advisory says.

The severity rating for the vulnerability was downgraded to “high” due to analysis that determined that certain mitigating factors should make it a less-severe issue, according to the OpenSSL advisory on the issue.

“Many platforms implement stack overflow protections which would mitigate against the risk of remote code execution,” the OpenSSL team wrote in the advisory.

One initial analysis suggests that exploiting the vulnerability is more difficult than it could be since the issue occurs after the validation of an encryption certificate.

For the second vulnerability, tracked at CVE-2022-3786, a malicious email address can be utilized to cause a buffer overflow and crash the system, but remote code execution is not mentioned as a potential concern.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison ( @dgoodison ) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

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We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

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Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich ) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

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Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

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Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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