Network security firm Cyberoam has released an update for all of its unified threat management (UTM) devices in response to the leak of the default private key used by all of the company’s UTM devices.
The company pushed the fix out over-the-air after an anonymous poster leaked the key online. The update forces devices to use unique certificate authority (CA) SSL certificates when intercepting SSL traffic on corporate networks.
“Within 24 hours of the knowing the situation, an alert message was pushed to each UTM appliance which had SSL scanning enabled,” the company posted in a blog. “This alert message was visible on the appliance dashboard highlighting an existing command that generated a unique CA for the appliance.”
“Keeping in mind, customers’ lack of awareness of this situation, Cyberoam then forcefully generated unique keys for all the remaining appliances,” the company continued. “This means that every Cyberoam UTM appliance now has a unique CA thus protecting the customers even if the private key is exposed willfully or by accident.”
Tor Project researcher Runa A. Sandvik blogged July 3 that all Cyberoam appliances with SSL traffic inspection capabilities were using the same self-generated CA certificate by default.
“Examination of a certificate chain generated by a Cyberoam DPI device shows that all such devices share the same CA certificate and hence the same private key,” Sandvik blogged. “It is therefore possible to intercept traffic from any victim of a Cyberoam device with any other Cyberoam device – or to extract the key from the device and import it into other DPI devices, and use those for interception.”
The company responded by stating that Cyberoam’s UTM devices do not store HTTPS Deep Scan Inspection data because processing is done in real-time. Therefore, the possibility of data interception between any two Cyberoam appliances is nullified, the company contended in a July 5 blog post.