The SRP user database lookup method SRP_VBASE_get_by_user had confusing
memory management semantics; the returned pointer was sometimes newly
allocated, and sometimes owned by the callee. The calling code has no
way of distinguishing these two cases.
Specifically, SRP servers that configure a secret seed to hide valid
login information are vulnerable to a memory leak: an attacker
connecting with an invalid username can cause a memory leak of around
300 bytes per connection.
Servers that do not configure SRP, or configure SRP but do not configure
a seed are not vulnerable.
In Apache, the seed directive is known as SSLSRPUnknownUserSeed.
To mitigate the memory leak, the seed handling in SRP_VBASE_get_by_user
is now disabled even if the user has configured a seed.
Applications are advised to migrate to SRP_VBASE_get1_by_user. However,
note that OpenSSL makes no strong guarantees about the
indistinguishability of valid and invalid logins. In particular,
computations are currently not carried out in constant time.
Reviewed-by: Rich Salz <rsalz@openssl.org>
59a908f1e8