Bug#594150: regression in apt-transport-https interop with apt-cacher

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 at 11:50:42 -0800, Johannes Ernst wrote:
> Apologies that I didn't see this question earlier:
> 
> http://apt-test.aviatis.com/ has now been updated with the Apache configuration.

Thank you! I think this is indeed fallout from CVE-2009-3555 (DSA-1394).
Quoting from the DSA, http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1934:

    A design flaw has been found in the TLS and SSL protocol that allows
    an attacker to inject arbitrary content at the beginning of a TLS/SSL
    connection. The attack is related to the way how TLS and SSL handle
    session renegotiations [...]  The attack is still possible in
    configurations where the server initiates the renegotiation. This
    is the case for the following configurations (the information in
    the changelog of the updated packages is slightly inaccurate):

        * The "SSLVerifyClient" directive is used in a Directory or
          Location context.
	* The "SSLCipherSuite" directive is used in
          a Directory or Location context.

Your server has SSLVerifyClient in a Directory context (really DirectoryMatch,
but that's equivalent), so when the client announces its intention to access
a path below /apt-cacher, your server performs renegotiation.

The TLS client used by apt-transport-https (gnutls) notices that this
renegotiation could be someone exploiting CVE-2009-3555, so it aborts the
TLS handshake.

The workaround suggested by DSA-1394 would be to move SSLVerifyClient up to
the <VirtualHost> context, avoiding the need for renegotiation (doing that
will require client certificates for the entire server, not just the
/apt-cacher path, though). Could you try that on your server? If that works,
I think we can close this bug.

The real fix for your configuration requires the server's apache2 and openssl
to be upgraded to versions which can perform secure renegotiation as an
extension; in squeeze that's been fixed in openssl >= 0.9.8m-1 and
apache2 >= 2.2.15-1, but these changes haven't been backported to lenny.

Regards,
    Simon