RHSA-2016:2779 — Security Advisory
Red Hat Security Advisory: nss and nss-util security update
Severity
ModerateRed Hat Product Security
Products
Official CSAF product identity
Published · November 16, 2016
Updated · June 30, 2026
Topic
An update for nss and nss-util is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Moderate. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.
Description
Network Security Services (NSS) is a set of libraries designed to support the cross-platform development of security-enabled client and server applications.
The nss-util packages provide utilities for use with the Network Security Services (NSS) libraries.
The following packages have been upgraded to a newer upstream version: nss (3.21.3), nss-util (3.21.3).
Security Fix(es):
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Multiple buffer handling flaws were found in the way NSS handled cryptographic data from the network. A remote attacker could use these flaws to crash an application using NSS or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the permission of the user running the application. (CVE-2016-2834)
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A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the way NSS handled invalid Diffie-Hellman keys. A remote client could use this flaw to crash a TLS/SSL server using NSS. (CVE-2016-5285)
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It was found that Diffie Hellman Client key exchange handling in NSS was vulnerable to small subgroup confinement attack. An attacker could use this flaw to recover private keys by confining the client DH key to small subgroup of the desired group. (CVE-2016-8635)
Red Hat would like to thank the Mozilla project for reporting CVE-2016-2834. The CVE-2016-8635 issue was discovered by Hubert Kario (Red Hat). Upstream acknowledges Tyson Smith and Jed Davis as the original reporter of CVE-2016-2834.