TOR Client Leaking Sensitive Information From Cache Memory, Later The Bug Has Been Fixed
Major security issue has been found in the world's most famous and widely used software for online anonymity, Tor (The Onion Router). A software developer named Andrey Karpov found that the anonymisation software uses a function called memset() to delete cache data, which is not supported by all compilers. In some cases, that can cause the TOR client to leave confidential data like passwords in the system memory when it is closed. The memset() function is problematic because it is automatically deleted when TOR is optimized for speed with a compiler like the one in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Once that happens, the data remains in system memory, where it can be read by malicious programs.
As soon as this security issue get spot light The Tor Project has immediately issues a fix to close the security vulnerability which leads to leak information from memory on some machines running Tor that could give an attacker access to sensitive information stored in the cache. The developers at the Tor Project were alerted to the problem recently and began looking into the issue. What they found is that in some cases, when the Tor client uses a function called memset to erase some cache data on a machine, some of that information will still remain when Tor exits. The data that remains could give an attacker access to sensitive information in the cache. The strring explaining the bug fix in Tor says that different compilers handle the situation differently. In their bug fix Tor Project says that "Tor tries to wipe potentially sensitive data after using it, so that if some subsequent security failure exposes Tor's memory, the damage will be limited. But we had a bug where the compiler was eliminating these wipe operations when it decided that the memory was no longer visible to a (correctly running) program, hence defeating our attempt at defense in depth. We fix that by using OpenSSL's OPENSSL_cleanse() operation, which a compiler is unlikely to optimize away. Future versions of Tor may use a less ridiculously heavy approach for this. Fixes bug 7352."
-Source (Tor Project, The-H & threatpost)
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