CentOS: 2003-032 Critical: GnuPG ElGamal Key Exposure Issue

GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is a GNU utility for encrypting data and

creating digital signatures. GnuPG has advanced key management

capabilities and is compliant with the proposed OpenPGP Internet

standard described in RFC2440. Since GnuPG doesn't use any patented

algorithm, it is not compatible with any version of PGP2 (PGP2.x uses

only IDEA for symmetric-key encryption, which is patented worldwide).

Phong Nguyen identified a severe bug in the way GnuPG creates and

uses ElGamal keys, when those keys are used both to sign and encrypt

data. This vulnerability can be used to trivially recover the

private key. While the default behavior of GnuPG when generating

keys does not lead to the creation of unsafe keys, by overriding the

default settings an unsafe key could have been created.

If you are using ElGamal keys, you should revoke those keys

immediately.

The packages included in this update do not make ElGamal keys safe to

use; they merely include a patch by David Shaw that disables

functions that would generate or use ElGamal keys for encryption.

- incorporate patch from gnupg-announce which removes the ability to create

ElGamal encrypt+sign keys or to sign messages with such keys

* Mon Oct 27 2003 Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin@RedHat.com> 1.2.3-1

- use -fPIE instead of -fpie because some arches need it

* Mon Oct 27 2003 Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin@RedHat.com>

- build gnupg as a position-independent executable (Arjan van de Ven)

* Mon Aug 25 2003 Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin@RedHat.com>

- add Werner's key as a source file

* Fri Aug 22 2003 Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin@RedHat.com>

- update to 1.2.3

b7457d205b1807677a352f734dd794b4 SRPMS/gnupg-1.2.3-2.src.rpm

b8d2688e98330f98e954ccffaf0aed79 i386/gnupg-1.2.3-2.i386.rpm

86b34157605dd65bd369d39a7b9d8ea2 i386/debug/gnupg-debuginfo-1.2.3-2.i386.rpm

This update can also be installed with the Update Agent; you can

launch the Update Agent with the 'up2date' command.