USN-252-1: gnupg vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

Tavis Ormandy discovered a potential weakness in the signature
verification of gnupg. gpgv and gpg --verify returned a successful
exit code even if the checked file did not have any signature at all.
The recommended way of checking the result is to evaluate the status
messages, but some third party applications might just check the exit
code for determining whether or not a signature is valid. These
applications could be tricked into erroneously reporting a valid
signature.

Please note that this does not affect the Ubuntu package signature
checks.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 5.10

• gnupg -

Ubuntu 5.04

• gnupg -

Ubuntu 4.10

• gnupg -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2006-0455