RHSA-2016:0008 — Security Advisory

Updated openssl packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

OpenSSL is a toolkit that implements the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols, as well as a full-strength, general purpose cryptography library.

A flaw was found in the way TLS 1.2 could use the MD5 hash function for signing ServerKeyExchange and Client Authentication packets during a TLS handshake. A man-in-the-middle attacker able to force a TLS connection to use the MD5 hash function could use this flaw to conduct collision attacks to impersonate a TLS server or an authenticated TLS client. (CVE-2015-7575)

All openssl users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. For the update to take effect, all services linked to the OpenSSL library must be restarted, or the system rebooted.