(RHSA-2013:0188) Important: ipa security update

Red Hat Identity Management is a centralized authentication, identity
management and authorization solution for both traditional and cloud-based
enterprise environments.

A weakness was found in the way IPA clients communicated with IPA servers
when initially attempting to join IPA domains. As there was no secure way
to provide the IPA server’s Certificate Authority (CA) certificate to the
client during a join, the IPA client enrollment process was susceptible to
man-in-the-middle attacks. This flaw could allow an attacker to obtain
access to the IPA server using the credentials provided by an IPA client,
including administrative access to the entire domain if the join was
performed using an administrator’s credentials. (CVE-2012-5484)

Note: This weakness was only exposed during the initial client join to the
realm, because the IPA client did not yet have the CA certificate of the
server. Once an IPA client has joined the realm and has obtained the CA
certificate of the IPA server, all further communication is secure. If a
client were using the OTP (one-time password) method to join to the realm,
an attacker could only obtain unprivileged access to the server (enough to
only join the realm).

Red Hat would like to thank Petr Menšík for reporting this issue.

This update must be installed on both the IPA client and IPA server. When
this update has been applied to the client but not the server,
ipa-client-install, in unattended mode, will fail if you do not have the
correct CA certificate locally, noting that you must use the “–force”
option to insecurely obtain the certificate. In interactive mode, the
certificate will try to be obtained securely from LDAP. If this fails, you
will be prompted to insecurely download the certificate via HTTP. In the
same situation when using OTP, LDAP will not be queried and you will be
prompted to insecurely download the certificate via HTTP.

Users of ipa are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
correct this issue. After installing the update, changes in LDAP are
handled by ipa-ldap-updater automatically and are effective immediately.