Opera implements OpenSSL fixes

By Alun Williams

Posted on 13 Aug 2002 at 12:10

Opera tightens up its handling of extra secure communication.

The changes relate to Opera's incorporation of OpenSSL, the open source implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security protocols (the OpenSSL ASN.1 patch).

The new Opera 6.05 release for Windows is a pure security upgrade and is recommended for all users. It implements the changes in OpenSSL made public on 7 August by the CERT Coordination Centre (CERT/CC).

The fixes close potential buffer-overflow vulnerabilities - a technique of probing applications with specially-constructed data, much favoured by hackers. It seems that several of the vulnerabilities could be used to execute arbitrary code on the target system and that all of them could be used in denial of service attacks.

You can read the CERT/CC advisory here, and the detailed change log is at opera.com/windows.

You can read more about OpenSSL at openssl.org.