[Bug 1103353] Re: Invalid GnuTLS cipher suite strings causeslibldapto crash

[Harry Coin]

On 04/07/2015 01:32 PM, Oleg Strikov wrote:
>   Client may crash itself
> by passing incorrect cipher suite to the API. While that's sad, it
> doesn't crash slapd itself
To the contrary, it certainly does crash slapd itself.   Anyone 
upgrading will at some point silently switch from a slapd that used 
openssl to gnutls --- without the package warning about nor updating the 
apropos config string.  As a result, "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade" 
results in slapd crashing with a double free as it loads the previous 
conf file.  Most package maintainers would refer to this as a regression 
inasmuch as the typical upgrade process fails to start and without any 
obvious warning.  The answer may be found by spending many hours 
googling for 'what the heck'.   For over a year this has gone unfixed.

At least improve the upgrade script to warn the installer and prevent 
slapd from starting until some flag is set noting the user has corrected 
the string and is aware the developers won't fix the issue.

In the alternative, I think a much better approach is to put a versions 
of all these and related packages compiled against openSSL in the 
appropriate repository.  It is not material to me whether this is fixed 
or not as I've removed all packages using gnutls until it's more mature, 
and won't revisit this again for at least four years.

In fact I'm looking for other distros like Mint that actually check 
whether upgrades generate regressions and classify risk assessments that 
allow only proven upgrades to succeed.

It's really quite an eye-opener to me that a distro aiming to be 
deployed outside the sole-user world doesn't see this as a problem.

--


Harry G Coin
Quiet Fountain LLC
2118 Lundy Ln
Bettendorf, Iowa 52722

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Title:
  Invalid GnuTLS cipher suite strings causes libldap to crash

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