Apple

CVE-2014-3566 relates to a flaw found in handling of padded bytes in SSL 3.0 when using CBC mode for the encryption[3]. The flaw may be exploited to permit a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. The attacker may be able to decrypt a selected byte of a cipher text in a limited number (256) of attempts, by repeatedly requesting the victim to send the same data over multiple SSLv3 connections.

The vulnerability exists in the protocol itself and not a specific implementation of the protocol e.g., OpenSSL, GnuTLS, etc. Thus, the mitigation is to stop using SSLv3 and to have TLSv1+ as the minimum.

To connect to an OpenVPN server you need an appropriate OpenVPN client installed to establish the SSL link. For Apple Mac OS X systems, TunnelBlick (http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/) is a good graphical user interface. At the time of this blog the current latest stable version of TunnelBlick available was 3.2.7. These instructions were executed on an Apple iMac running Mac OS X 10.7.4. As with all other posts on this blog, the purpose of this post is not to provide a tutorial, but instead to documents the steps taken, for my own benefit.

Apple IU Software Update service allows uses to keep their Mac OS X machines updated with the latest software updates and security patched. In some controlled environments, the update servers are specified in the user profile. Sometimes there may be delays in the server updates, or problems with the local update server and users may desire to connect to Apple’s services directly. Here’s are some instructions that users may find useful. Please note that to make configuration changes you will need Administrative privileges on your Mac.

While compiling a LaTeX document, a blank template of my PhD thesis to be exact, when I got the following error “! LaTeX Error: File `apacite.sty’ not found.” Again a quick search for Mac ports indicated that the texlive-bibtex-extra package was required. It was quickly installed using;

sudo port install texlive-bibtex-extra

Subsequent compile yielded more errors, this time it was “! Undefined control sequence. \abstract”. This was solved using the texlive-latex-extra package, installed using;