Kerberos 5 Release 1.14.4

• Announcement
• README file
• Known Bugs
• Documentation
• Retrieving

Kerberos 5 Release 1.14.4 is now available

The MIT Kerberos Team announces the availability of the krb5-1.14.4 release. The detached PGP signature is available without going through the download page, if you wish to verify the authenticity of a distribution you have obtained elsewhere.

Please see the README file for a more complete list of changes.

You may also see the current full list of fixed bugs tracked in our RT bugtracking system.

DES transition

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is widely recognized as weak. The krb5-1.7 release contains measures to encourage sites to migrate away from using single-DES cryptosystems. Among these is a configuration variable that enables "weak" enctypes, which now defaults to "false" beginning with krb5-1.8.

Major changes in 1.14.4 (2016-09-13)

This is a bug fix release.

• Fix some rare btree data corruption bugs
• Fix numerous minor memory leaks
• Improve portability (Linux-ppc64el, FreeBSD)
• Improve some error messages
• Improve documentation

Major changes in 1.14.3 (2016-07-20)

This is a bug fix release.

• Improve some error messages
• Improve documentation
• Allow a principal with nonexistent policy to bypass the minimum password lifetime check, consistent with other aspects of nonexistent policies
• Fix a rare KDC denial of service vulnerability when anonymous client principals are restricted to obtaining TGTs only [CVE-2016-3120]

Major changes in 1.14.2 (2016-04-18)

This is a bug fix release.

• Fix a moderate-severity vulnerability in the LDAP KDC back end that could be exploited by a privileged kadmin user [CVE-2016-3119]
• Improve documentation
• Fix some interactions with GSSAPI interposer mechanisms

Major changes in 1.14.1 (2016-02-29)

This is a bug fix release.

• Fix some moderate-severity vulnerabilities [CVE-2015-8629, CVE-2015-8630, CVE-2015-8631] in kadmind.
• Improve behavior on hosts with long hostnames.
• Avoid spurious failures when doing normal kprop to heavily loaded slave KDCs.

Major changes in 1.14 (2015-11-20)

Administrator experience:

• Add a new kdb5_util tabdump command to provide reporting-friendly tabular dump formats (tab-separated or CSV) for the KDC database. Unlike the normal dump format, each output table has a fixed number of fields. Some tables include human-readable forms of data that are opaque in ordinary dump files. This format is also suitable for importing into relational databases for complex queries.
• Add support to kadmin and kadmin.local for specifying a single command line following any global options, where the command arguments are split by the shell--for example, "kadmin getprinc principalname". Commands issued this way do not prompt for confirmation or display warning messages, and exit with non-zero status if the operation fails.
• Accept the same principal flag names in kadmin as we do for the default_principal_flags kdc.conf variable, and vice versa. Also accept flag specifiers in the form that kadmin prints, as well as hexadecimal numbers.
• Remove the triple-DES and RC4 encryption types from the default value of supported_enctypes, which determines the default key and salt types for new password-derived keys. By default, keys will only created only for AES128 and AES256. This mitigates some types of password guessing attacks.
• Add support for directory names in the KRB5_CONFIG and KRB5_KDC_PROFILE environment variables.
• Add support for authentication indicators, which are ticket annotations to indicate the strength of the initial authentication. Add support for the "require_auth" string attribute, which can be set on server principal entries to require an indicator when authenticating to the server.
• Add support for key version numbers larger than 255 in keytab files, and for version numbers up to 65535 in KDC databases.
• Transmit only one ETYPE-INFO and/or ETYPE-INFO2 entry from the KDC during pre-authentication, corresponding to the client's most preferred encryption type.
• Add support for server name identification (SNI) when proxying KDC requests over HTTPS.
• Add support for the err_fmt profile parameter, which can be used to generate custom-formatted error messages.

Code quality:

• Fix memory aliasing issues in SPNEGO and IAKERB mechanisms that could cause server crashes. [CVE-2015-2695] [CVE-2015-2696] [CVE-2015-2698]
• Fix build_principal memory bug that could cause a KDC crash. [CVE-2015-2697]

Developer experience:

• Change gss_acquire_cred_with_password() to acquire credentials into a private memory credential cache. Applications can use gss_store_cred() to make the resulting credentials visible to other processes.
• Change gss_acquire_cred() and SPNEGO not to acquire credentials for IAKERB or for non-standard variants of the krb5 mechanism OID unless explicitly requested. (SPNEGO will still accept the Microsoft variant of the krb5 mechanism OID during negotiation.)
• Change gss_accept_sec_context() not to accept tokens for IAKERB or for non-standard variants of the krb5 mechanism OID unless an acceptor credential is acquired for those mechanisms.
• Change gss_acquire_cred() to immediately resolve credentials if the time_rec parameter is not NULL, so that a correct expiration time can be returned. Normally credential resolution is delayed until the target name is known.
• Add krb5_prepend_error_message() and krb5_wrap_error_message() APIs, which can be used by plugin modules or applications to add prefixes to existing detailed error messages.
• Add krb5_c_prfplus() and krb5_c_derive_prfplus() APIs, which implement the RFC 6113 PRF+ operation and key derivation using PRF+.
• Add support for pre-authentication mechanisms which use multiple round trips, using the the KDC_ERR_MORE_PREAUTH_DATA_REQUIRED error code. Add get_cookie() and set_cookie() callbacks to the kdcpreauth interface; these callbacks can be used to save marshalled state information in an encrypted cookie for the next request.
• Add a client_key() callback to the kdcpreauth interface to retrieve the chosen client key, corresponding to the ETYPE-INFO2 entry sent by the KDC.
• Add an add_auth_indicator() callback to the kdcpreauth interface, allowing pre-authentication modules to assert authentication indicators.
• Add support for the GSS_KRB5_CRED_NO_CI_FLAGS_X cred option to suppress sending the confidentiality and integrity flags in GSS initiator tokens unless they are requested by the caller. These flags control the negotiated SASL security layer for the Microsoft GSS-SPNEGO SASL mechanism.
• Make the FILE credential cache implementation less prone to corruption issues in multi-threaded programs, especially on platforms with support for open file description locks.

Performance:

• On slave KDCs, poll the master KDC immediately after processing a full resync, and do not require two full resyncs after the master KDC's log file is reset.

User experience:

• Make gss_accept_sec_context() accept tickets near their expiration but within clock skew tolerances, rather than rejecting them immediately after the server's view of the ticket expiration time.

Retrieving Kerberos 5 Release 1.14.4

You may retrieve the Kerberos 5 Release 1.14.4 source from here. If you need to acquire the sources from some other distribution site, you may verify them against the detached PGP signature for krb5-1.14.4.