USN-3944-1: wpa_supplicant and hostapd vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 18.10
• Ubuntu 18.04 ESM
• Ubuntu 16.04 ESM
• Ubuntu 14.04 ESM

Packages

• wpa - client support for WPA and WPA2

Details

It was discovered that wpa_supplicant and hostapd were vulnerable to a
side channel attack against EAP-pwd. A remote attacker could possibly use
this issue to recover certain passwords. (CVE-2019-9495)

Mathy Vanhoef discovered that wpa_supplicant and hostapd incorrectly
validated received scalar and element values in EAP-pwd-Commit messages. A
remote attacker could possibly use this issue to perform a reflection
attack and authenticate without the appropriate password. (CVE-2019-9497,
CVE-2019-9498, CVE-2019-9499)

It was discovered that hostapd incorrectly handled obtaining random
numbers. In rare cases where the urandom device isn't available, it would
fall back to using a low-quality PRNG. This issue only affected Ubuntu
14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-10743)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 18.10

• hostapd - 2:2.6-18ubuntu1.1
• wpasupplicant - 2:2.6-18ubuntu1.1

Ubuntu 18.04

• hostapd - 2:2.6-15ubuntu2.2
• wpasupplicant - 2:2.6-15ubuntu2.2

Ubuntu 16.04

• hostapd - 1:2.4-0ubuntu6.4
• wpasupplicant - 2.4-0ubuntu6.4

Ubuntu 14.04

• hostapd - 1:2.1-0ubuntu1.7
• wpasupplicant - 2.1-0ubuntu1.7

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make
all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2016-10743
• CVE-2019-9495
• CVE-2019-9497
• CVE-2019-9498
• CVE-2019-9499