qulogic/pidgin

Fix basic constraints checking for both our SSL plugins.
release-2.x.y
2014-10-12, Mark Doliner
2e4475087f04
Fix basic constraints checking for both our SSL plugins.

This was reported to our private security@pidgin.im mailing list
by an anonymous person and Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor project.

The general problem is described by Moxie Marlinspike here:
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/ie-ssl-chain.txt

Turns out BOTH of our SSL/TLS plugins are vulnerable to this. It allows
a malicious man-in-the-middle to impersonate an https server accessed by
Pidgin.

The fix for this was difficult. We'd really like to just delegate all cert
validate to the NSS or GnuTLS plugins and not do any of it ourselves, because
they're experts and we're not. And this is essentially the change we made for
NSS. However, this was difficult for GnuTLS because we need a context that we
don't have access to in the right function. We could have done it, but it
would have been a little hacky. So for our GnuTLS plugin we added basic
constraints checking ourselves. In Pidgin 3.0.0 would should clean this up
and remove a lot of internal cert validation and ALWAYS delegate to the
SSL/TLS library.

The NSS parts of this patch were written by Kai Engert and Daniel Atallah.
I wrote the GnuTLS parts.

We'll be requesting a CVE number for this.

Also, my thanks to Jacob Appelbaum and Moxie Marlinspike for their efforts
over many years to improve the security of the software that we use on a
daily basis. They are both stand-out citizens who have made contributions
to protect the privacy of all internet users. Thanks, guys!
If you plan to use Pidgin, Finch and libpurple from our Mercurial repository,
PLEASE read this message in its entirety!
Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple are a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular
release schedule. Due to the rate of development, the code in our Mercurial
repository undergoes frequent bursts of massive changes, often leaving behind
brokenness and partial functionality while the responsible developers rewrite
some portion of code or seek to add new features.
What this all boils down to is that the code in our Mercurial repository _WILL_
sometimes be broken. Because of this, we ask that users who are not interested
in personally tracking down bugs and fixing them (without a lot of
assistance from the developers!) use only released versions. Since releases
will be made often, this should not prevent anyone from using the newest,
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development bugs that we already know about but haven't gotten around to fixing.
If you are interested in hacking on Pidgin, Finch, and/or libpurple, please
check out the information available at: http://developer.pidgin.im
By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code. If you have
doxygen, you can run "make docs" in the toplevel directory to generate pretty
documentation. Otherwise (or even if you do!), the header files for each
subsystem contain documentation for the functions they contain. For instance,
conversation.h contains documentation for the entire purple_conversation_*
API, and account.h contains documentation for the purple_account_* API.
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