SUMMARY

Symantec’s PGP Universal Server, under specific circumstances, may inadvertently expose a PGP client’s private key.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec became aware that in certain specific instances, the PGP Universal Server failed to properly clear a PGP client’s authenticated session at the termination of an authorized PGP key search request. This could result in the unauthorized exposure of that client’s private key during and immediately following an unauthenticated request from another PGP client. 

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers have verified this issue and released an update addressing it. Symantec recommends customers update to PGP Universal Server 3.2.1 MP2 or later.

Update information

Customers may obtain Symantec’s PGP Universal Server 3.2.1 MP2 update through their normal PGP support locations.

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Disable remote access if not required or restrict it to trusted/authorized systems only.
• Where possible, limit exposure of application and web interfaces to trusted/internal networks only.
• Keep all operating systems and applications updated with the latest vendor patches.
• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. Run both firewall and anti-malware applications, at a minimum, to provide multiple points of detection and protection to both inbound and outbound threats.
• Deploy network and host-based intrusion detection systems to monitor network traffic for signs of anomalous or suspicious activity. This may aid in detection of attacks or malicious activity related to exploitation of latent vulnerabilities

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Symantec would like to thank Greg Ose and Mark Gould of CME Group for contacting us concerning this issue and coordinating with us as we resolved it.

REFERENCES

BID: Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned Bugtraq ID (BID) to this issue for inclusion in the Security Focus vulnerability database.

CVE: This issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems.