Vulnerability in OpenSSL CVE-2016-0798

The SRP user database lookup method SRP_VBASE_get_by_user had confusing memory management semantics; the returned pointer was sometimes newly allocated, and sometimes owned by the callee. The calling code has no way of distinguishing these two cases. Specifically, SRP servers that configure a secret seed to hide valid login information are vulnerable to a memory leak: an attacker connecting with an invalid username can cause a memory leak of around 300 bytes per connection. Servers that do not configure SRP, or configure SRP but do not configure a seed are not vulnerable. In Apache, the seed directive is known as SSLSRPUnknownUserSeed. To mitigate the memory leak, the seed handling in SRP_VBASE_get_by_user is now disabled even if the user has configured a seed. Applications are advised to migrate to SRP_VBASE_get1_by_user. However, note that OpenSSL makes no strong guarantees about the indistinguishability of valid and invalid logins. In particular, computations are currently not carried out in constant time.