Bug 341069

Summary:	plasma-nm created OpenVPN connections vulnerable to MITM attack
Product:	Network Management	Reporter:	Richard Yao <ryao>
Component:	OpenVPN	Assignee:	Lamarque V. Souza <lamarque>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	major	CC:	jgrulich
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Gentoo Packages
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:	http://commits.kde.org/plasma-nm/f612d1d473805a273812aa9ea2f4c561e338d9a9	Version Fixed In:

Description Richard Yao 2014-11-18 03:53:28 UTC

plasma-nm does not tell OpenVPN to perform server certificate verification. Consequently, anyone with the preshared key is able to perform a MITM attack by impersonating the server. OpenVPN warns about this on each boot:

Nov 17 22:40:56 t520 nm-openvpn[29005]: WARNING: No server certificate verification method has been enabled.  See http://openvpn.net/howto.html#mitm for more info.

This issue has been around for years and was present in plasma-nm's predecessor.

Comment 1 Richard Yao 2014-11-18 03:54:48 UTC

By boot, I mean program invocation and that message is from dmesg.

Comment 2 Jan Grulich 2014-11-26 12:18:30 UTC

Git commit 863851110191d0480375d6c86ba8082dae9ac950 by Jan Grulich.
Committed on 26/11/2014 at 12:18.
Pushed by grulich into branch 'master'.

OpenVPN: Add option for server certificate verification

M  +1    -0    vpn/openvpn/nm-openvpn-service.h
M  +191  -111  vpn/openvpn/openvpnadvanced.ui
M  +15   -0    vpn/openvpn/openvpnadvancedwidget.cpp

http://commits.kde.org/plasma-nm/863851110191d0480375d6c86ba8082dae9ac950

Comment 3 Jan Grulich 2014-11-26 12:48:26 UTC

Git commit f612d1d473805a273812aa9ea2f4c561e338d9a9 by Jan Grulich.
Committed on 26/11/2014 at 12:48.
Pushed by grulich into branch '0.9.3'.

OpenVPN: Add option for server certificate verification

M  +1    -0    vpn/openvpn/nm-openvpn-service.h
M  +179  -96   vpn/openvpn/openvpnadvanced.ui
M  +14   -0    vpn/openvpn/openvpnadvancedwidget.cpp

http://commits.kde.org/plasma-nm/f612d1d473805a273812aa9ea2f4c561e338d9a9

Comment 4 Richard Yao 2014-11-29 02:53:45 UTC

Thanks for the prompt fix.