RHSA-2018:2123 — Security Advisory

An update for python is now available for 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.

Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language, which includes modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types and dynamic typing. Python supports interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems.

Security Fix(es):

• A flaw was found in the way the DES/3DES cipher was used as part of the TLS/SSL protocol. A man-in-the-middle attacker could use this flaw to recover some plaintext data by capturing large amounts of encrypted traffic between TLS/SSL server and client if the communication used a DES/3DES based ciphersuite. (CVE-2016-2183)

Note: This update modifies the Python ssl module to disable 3DES cipher suites by default.

Red Hat would like to thank OpenVPN for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Karthikeyan Bhargavan (Inria) and Gaëtan Leurent (Inria) as the original reporters.