CVE-2014-9365

Published: 12 December 2014

The HTTP clients in the (1) httplib, (2) urllib, (3) urllib2, and (4) xmlrpclib libraries in CPython (aka Python) 2.x before 2.7.9 and 3.x before 3.4.3, when accessing an HTTPS URL, do not (a) check the certificate against a trust store or verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's (b) Common Name or (c) subjectAltName field of the X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via an arbitrary valid certificate.

Notes

This is https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0476/
Before this was implemented in python 2.7.9 and 3.4.3,
applications needed to verify certificate validity themselves.
This is quite a large change to backport into stable releases,
and the change in behaviour most certainly will break certain
setups.

We're considering the possibility of offering an opt-in fix for
this issue via PEP 493 if the backport is not too invasive
python3.4 in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS can be configured to perform full
certificate verification via the /etc/python3.4/cert-verification.conf
configuration file

we will not be fixing this in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS before EoL.
Users are encouraged to migrate to a more recent Ubuntu version,
or migrate their applications to python 3.

Status

References

• https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-9365
• http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/1022
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian

Bugs

• https://launchpad.net/bugs/1401322