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SUSE Solution Security Risk Report 2021

SUSE Best Practices

Security

Author
Stoyan Manolov, Head of Solution Security (SUSE)
SUSE logo
All SUSE Products
Date: 2022-04-27

SUSE Solution Security is committed to delivering best in class software security to its customers and to the open source community. The primary objectives are to treat software security as an ongoing and continual process.

The SUSE Security Team addresses all aspects of software security on an ongoing basis. Software security cannot be thought of as a state you can achieve at a specific point in time. Instead, it is a process that must be executed with professional expertise and continuous development. This persistent focus is what has given open source software, Linux and SUSE an excellent reputation for security.

The objective of this report is to provide a summary of all security vulnerabilities which affected SUSE products in calendar year 2021.

Disclaimer: This document is part of the SUSE Best Practices series. All documents published in this series were contributed voluntarily by SUSE employees and by third parties. If not stated otherwise inside the document, the articles are intended only to be one example of how a particular action could be taken. Also, SUSE cannot verify either that the actions described in the articles do what they claim to do or that they do not have unintended consequences. All information found in this document has been compiled with utmost attention to detail. However, this does not guarantee complete accuracy. Therefore, we need to specifically state that neither SUSE LLC, its affiliates, the authors, nor the translators may be held liable for possible errors or the consequences thereof.

1 Motivation

SUSE Solution Security is committed to delivering best in class software security to its customers and to the open source community.

The primary objectives are to treat software security as an ongoing and continual process. This implies to

  • promptly react to security incidents and deliver premium quality security updates.

  • continuously improve the security related functionality in SUSE products.

  • continuously contribute to the rapidly growing maturity of open source software.

  • respect the open source software security principles of openness, transparency and traceability.

At the same time, any software can also contain errors (both deliberate and accidental) which could affect the system's security, including design flaws, programming errors, and backdoors.

The SUSE Security Team addresses all of these aspects of software security on an ongoing basis. Software security cannot be thought of as a state you can achieve at a specific point in time. Instead, it is a process that must be executed with professional expertise and continuous development. This persistent focus is what has given open source software, Linux and SUSE such an excellent reputation for security.

2 Background

Software provides security features (such as authentication methods, encryption, intrusion prevention and detection, backup and others). However, it can also contain errors (such as design flaws, programming errors, and even backdoors) that often turn out to be relevant for the system's security. The SUSE Security Team's task is to addresses all of these aspects of software security, with the understanding that security in software is a challenge that never ends. Software security cannot be understood a state taken at some certain point in time; it is a process that must be filled with professional expertise and permanent development, both on software and on skills. The resulting evolution is what has given open source software, Linux and SUSE its excellent reputation for security.

A modern Linux operating system, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for enterprise use or the openSUSE community distribution for home use, features a rich set of security programs and functions that range from access controls, intrusion prevention and detection, flexible and trustworthy authentication mechanisms, encryption for files and network connections, file integrity checking utilities, to network analysis tools and monitoring/logging utilities for your system. To complement this, there are advanced tools that help you to securely configure and administer your system, and to securely download and install update packages. These utilities are standard in SUSE products. The update packages fix security bugs that have been found after your product has been released. The security features of your Linux system are waiting for you to explore them. SUSE encourages our customers to take advantage of them to further improve the level of privacy and security that is built into every system by default.

Programs are usually written by humans, and humans make mistakes. By consequence, all software can contain errors. Some of these errors appear as instabilities (the software or the entire system crashes), while others may not have any apparent, visible effect. However, some software errors may introduce a security risk. A local or a remote attacker may be able to feed specially drafted data to the software which takes advantage of the programming error (in the case of a remotely exploitable bug, the data comes from an attached network device, such as a cable or DSL modem, or a wireless network interface card). The application then either crashes, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, or it executes code that originates from the attacker, transferring control over the execution context from what the programmer intended to what the attacker has in mind for the exploitation of the error. Depending on the software's function, the resulting security breach can impose little or high security risks for your data and your system, potentially giving an attacker the opportunity to delete, alter or even steal your data, or use the system for his own purposes.

The SUSE Solution Security team is responsible for handling all SUSE product-related security incidents. In that team, clear and well-defined roles are assigned for tracking new incidents and coordinating needed updates. The team works with all SUSE engineering software specialists.

We use multiple sources to understand security incidents. These sources include the Mitre and NVD Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) databases, various security mailing lists (OSS security, Linux distros, distros, bugtraq, and full-disclosure), direct reports, and other Linux vendors databases. We are also part of various pre-notification mailing lists for software components, like Xen, Samba, X.ORG. Confidential pre-notifications about vulnerabilities will be treated according to established responsible disclosure procedures.

3 Incident rating and tracking

We rate the severity of incidents with two different systems, a simplified rating system and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) v3.1 scoring system. The CVSS is an open framework for communicating the characteristics and severity of software vulnerabilities. It is being developed by the US-based non-profit organization FIRST.org: Its main goal is to assign the right score to a vulnerability to help security administrators prioritize responses and resources to specific threats. CVSS v3.1 scoring consists of three metric groups: Base, Temporal, and Environmental. The Base group represents the intrinsic qualities of a vulnerability that are constant over time and across user environments. The Temporal group reflects the characteristics of a vulnerability that change over time. The Environmental group represents the characteristics of a vulnerability that are unique to a user's environment. The Base metrics produce a score ranging from 0 to 10, which can then be modified by scoring the Temporal and Environmental metrics. A CVSS score is also represented as a vector string, a compressed textual representation of the values used to derive the score. Today, SUSE uses the Base score methodology to evaluate vulnerabilities throughout the support lifecycle of our products. SUSE keeps the right to adjust the final score of the vulnerability as more details become known and available throughout the analysis. The most current CVSS resources can be found at https://www.first.org/cvss/ . The CVSS v3.1 calculator used by SUSE could be found at https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/3.1. The framework is measuring the severity of a given vulnerability, not the associated risk alone. The scoring of any vulnerability may vary with different analysts hence the final score could be slightly different between vendors impacted by that vulnerability. For a more accurate assessment of the impact, vendors and application owners must always consider factors outside of CVSS such as exposure or threat.

The security incidents are tracked in our own workflow system, technical details are tracked in the SUSE bug-tracking system, and the updated software package is built, processed, and published by our internal Open Build System. Internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) corresponding to the severity rating are monitored and reviewed regularly. Our packagers backport the required security fixes to our version of the software. To protect the stability of our customer setups, we only rarely do minor version upgrades. After receiving fixes for the affected software, four eye reviews cross-check the source patches. A number of automated checks verify source and binary compatibility and the completeness of patch meta information. They also check whether patches can be installed without problems. Dedicated QA teams provide integration, bug fix, and regression testing for all updates before they are released to our customers. After the release of an update, automated processes publish the updates, update notices, and cross reference information on our CVE index pages and machine-readable OVAL and CVRF XML information.

The objective of this report is to provide a summary of all security vulnerabilities which affected SUSE products in calendar year 2021. We will go into details on the high impact vulnerabilities which affected our products in 2021 and elaborate on how we responded to these incidents. For a better understanding of our classification mechanisms, we have described our rating system along with the equivalency of each rating to the CVSS v3.1 scoring calculator:

Table 1: Incident rating and CVSS score
RatingCVSS ScoreDefinition
Critical9.0 and aboveThis rating is given to flaws that could be easily exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker and lead to system compromise (arbitrary code execution) without requiring user interaction. These are the types of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by worms. Flaws that require an authenticated remote user, a local user, or an unlikely configuration are not classed as critical impact.
Important7.0 to 8.9This rating is given to flaws that can easily compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of resources. These are the types of vulnerabilities that allow local users to gain privileges, allow unauthenticated remote users to view resources that should otherwise be protected by authentication, allow authenticated remote users to execute arbitrary code, or allow remote unauthenticated users to cause a denial of service without user interaction.
Moderate 4.0 to 6.9This rating is given to flaws that may be more difficult to Copyright © SUSE 2022 5 exploit but could still lead to some compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of resources, under certain circumstances. These are the types of vulnerabilities that could have had a critical impact or important impact but are less easily exploited based on a technical evaluation of the flaw, or affect unlikely configurations. Local, persistent (service needs to be restarted) denial of service conditions for basic system services (kernel, systemd, polkit, dbus, etc.) with and without user interaction should also be rated moderate.
Low up to 3.9 This rating is given to all other issues that have a security impact. These are the types of vulnerabilities that are believed to require unlikely circumstances to be able to be exploited, or where a successful exploit would give minimal consequences.

4 When to prefer version upgrades over backports

It is a general policy rule that no new upstream versions of a package are introduced into our enterprise products. This rule is not an absolute rule however. For certain types of packages, in particular antivirus software, security concerns weigh heavier than the conservative approach that is preferable from the perspective of quality assurance. For packages in that class, occasionally newer versions are introduced to a released version of an enterprise product line.

Sometimes also for other types of packages the choice is made to introduce a new version rather than a backport. This is done when producing a backport is not economically feasible or when there is a very relevant technical reason to introduce the newer version.

5 Major security vulnerabilities in 2021

5.1 Log4Shell

Overview

On Friday, December 10th 2021, a new vulnerability in the log4j Java logging framework was reported, which could be trivially exploited. The 0-day exploit in the log4j Java logging framework was found by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud Security Team, which allowed remote attackers able to inject strings into log4j based Java logging to execute code by exploiting the default enabled JNDI bindings. This is possible without any preconditions, making it critical. This vulnerability is caused by a new feature introduced in log4j 2.x versions where a specific string embedded in messages logged by log4j would be interpreted as Java code.

The vulnerability, also called log4shell does not impact SUSE Linux Enterprise products directly as these are still shipping an older version of log4j that is not affected by this bug.

SUSE Rancher is not affected by this vulnerability. The Helm chart for Istio 1.5, provided by Rancher and which is currently deprecated, includes Zipkin and is vulnerable to log4j. Customers are advised to upgrade to the recent Istio version provided in Cluster Explorer, which does not uses Zipkin and is not affect to the vulnerability.

The vulnerability does not affect SUSE Manager, as it is using at most log4j 1.2.x, which is not affected. One component of SUSE OpenStack Cloud (storm) embeds log4j 2.x, which immediately received the required update. The SUSE NeuVector product is not affected by this vulnerability, but its security scanner functionality has now added support for scanning your containers, see the NeuVector log4j2 page.

A much less severe similar vulnerability was discovered in older log4j 1.2.x versions via the JMS interface. This JMS functionality is not default enabled, administrators must have enabled it. SUSE has also published updates for log4j 1.2 versions disabling the JMS functionality completely.

For the log4j 1.2.x packages, SUSE is already fixing security issues in these packages, even though upstream has declared them end-of-life. In parallel, SUSE will ship log4j 2.x versions where possible so customers can migrate to the newer log4j major release.

Solution

SUSE considers log4j versions 2.0 and newer as affected, log4j 1.2.x does not have the same critical vulnerability and is not considered affected by this CVE.

  • SUSE OpenStack Cloud embeds log4j2 in the "storm" component, which received updates within 5 days of the initial vulnerability announcement. SUSE customers are advised to get the release security update for the mitigation of this vulnerability.

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise products do not ship log4j 2.x.

  • SUSE Manager does not ship log4j 2.x.

  • SUSE Enterprise Storage does not ship log4j 2.x.

  • SUSE NeuVector product does not ship log4j 2.x

References

5.2 SADDNS / DNSpooq

Security researchers from University of California and Tsinghua University have identified a new variant of DNS cache poisoning attacks called SADDNS (Side-channel AttackeD DNS) due to a side channel attack against ICMP replies.

As DNS is primarily UDP-based, it is open to malicious package injection attacks, and various have been identified over time. The DNSSSEC enhancement would fix the package injection attacks using cryptographic integrity protection, but is not yet widely deployed.

When using traditional DNS, there have been two primary mitigations against this kind of poisoning been added:

  • Randomization of the transaction ID (a 16 bit identity in every DNS packet)

  • Randomization of the UDP port sending/receiving the replies (another 16 bit entity)

The researchers have now shown that the current Linux kernels have a side-channel attack using predictable ICMP port-unreachable replies on non-open UDP ports, like for example DNS reply ports, which allows attackers to remotely detect the open ports.

Making it a 32-bit wide space to exhaust for brute force attacks would also reduce the attack surface to 16 bit space, making DNS cache poisoning attacks again possible.

Solution

The best solution is to remove this side channel attack from the Linux kernel. The reappearance of the DNS cache poisoning attack allows remote attackers to pretend to be different hosts if your host is reachable from the Internet, allowing man-in-the-middle attacks against encrypted communication or software delivery.

SUSE is delivering Linux kernel updates to again mitigate the SADDNS attack. We also recommend to use DNSSEC, which in general avoids this kind of attack.

SADDNS, while potentially serious to not patched systems, poses little danger to those who keep their SUSE product patched and up to date. SUSE released fixes and updates to all affected versions, eliminating the potential for disruption.

References

5.3 Baron Samedit: Heap-based buffer overflow in sudo

Security researchers from Qualys discovered a new vulnerability in sudo which allows unauthenticated attackers to gain root privileges. The attackers need to have access to the system as a user to exploit this vulnerability but after they are logged in they do not need to provide any further authentication password to escalate their privilege to root.

The vulnerable code that causes the heap-based buffer overflow was introduced in sudo version 1.8.2.

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 products are affected.

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 products are not affected.

Solution

Fixes have been provided for all affected and supported SUSE products. For more details, check the CVE Web page referenced below.

References

5.4 Salt: Several remote code execution vulnerabilities

SaltStack announced a security release fixing several critical issues. The issues range from privilege escalation, missing TLS/SSL certificate validation, or directory traversal to possible command injection.

Solution

SUSE released fixes and updates for all of the affected and supported SUSE products. See the CVEs referenced below:

  • CVE-2020-28243: A privilege escalation is possible on a SaltStack minion when an unprivileged user can create files in any non-blacklisted directory via a command injection in a processes' name. Simply ending a file with (deleted) and keeping a file handle open to it is enough to trigger the exploit whenever a restart check is triggered from a SaltStack master.

  • CVE-2020-28972: In SaltStack Salt v2015.8.0 through v3002.2, authentication to vCenter, vSphere, and ESXi servers does not always validate the TLS/SSL certificate.

  • CVE-2021-3148: This is an issue in SaltStack Salt v2016.3.0 through v3002.2. Sending crafted Web requests to the Salt API, when using the SSH client, can result in command injection.

  • CVE-2021-25281: The Salt API does not honor eAuth credentials for the wheel_async client. Thus, an attacker can remotely run any wheel modules on the master.

  • CVE-2021-25282: The salt.wheel.pillar_roots.write method is vulnerable to directory traversal.

  • CVE-2021-25283: The jinja render does not protect against server-side template injection attacks.

  • CVE-2021-3144: eAuth tokens can be used once after expiration.

  • CVE-2021-25284: Salt.modules.cmdmod can log credential to the error log level

  • CVE-2021-3197: The Salt API's SSH client is vulnerable to a shell injection by including ProxyCommand in an argument, or via ssh_options provided in an API request.

  • CVE-2020-35662: In SaltStack Salt v2015.8.0 through v3002.2, when authenticating to services using certain modules ( asam runner, qingcloud, splunk returner, panos proxy, cimc proxy, zenoss module, esxi module, vsphere module, glassfish module, bigip module, and keystone module), the SSL certificate is not always validated.

5.5 OMIGOD

Security researchers found that Microsoft Azure injects a specific health monitoring package OMI agent into public cloud Linux instances when certain other Azure services are enabled for a given instance.

The services known to trigger the injection of the vulnerable package are as follows:

  • Azure Automation

  • Azure Automatic Update

  • Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS)

  • Azure Log Analytics

  • Azure Configuration Management

  • Azure Diagnostics

The deployed code has several easy-to-exploit remote vulnerabilities. See the CVEs listed below:

  • CVE-2021-38647: Unauthenticated RCE as root (Severity: 9.8)

  • CVE-2021-38648: Privilege Escalation vulnerability (Severity: 7.8)

  • CVE-2021-38645: Privilege Escalation vulnerability (Severity: 7.8)

  • CVE-2021-38649: Privilege Escalation vulnerability (Severity: 7.0)

To see if your instance is using the code in question, use:

rpm -qa omi

As the package is maintained and injected by Microsoft into Azure instances, and is not delivered by SUSE, SUSE cannot provide fixes.

Solution

Visit https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2021-38647 for more details on this vulnerability. You should take several steps to prevent your IT environment from being vulnerable to the OMIGOD vulnerability:

  • Verify your network settings and ensure ports 5985, 5986, 1270 are not exposed to the Internet. If these ports are exposed to the Internet, it is recommended to consider your system as compromised.

  • Redeploy your instance using a network construct with ports 5985, 5986, 1270 closed to the Internet.

If this is not feasible, follow the installation steps for SUSE at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/Linux-Package-Repository-for-Microsoft-Software :

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12: sudo rpm -Uvh https://packages.microsoft.com/config/sles/12/packagesmicrosoft-prod.rpm

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15: sudo rpm -Uvh https://packages.microsoft.com/config/sles/15/packagesmicrosoft-prod.rpm

  • Run zypper up to update the OMI agents from the newly added repository.

5.6 DHEATER

Security researchers from Balasys have published a new attack on Diffie-Hellman key exchange which allows remote attackers to attack network facing SSL / TLS / HTTPS / SSH services. This is leading to excessive compute time usage already by sending small amounts of network traffic even before authentication. All applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise that have DHE enabled are affected. The Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral key exchange is usually configured by default to provide perfect forward secrecy. The Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman protocol is not affected by this vulnerability.

Solution

This vulnerability is a protocol level problem. SUSE continues to monitor if and when cryptographic libraries will develop and implement counter measures in their Diffie-Hellman code, and then backport those fixes. Up to then, the DHE key exchange method should be disabled and the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman method should being used as a workaround.

SUSE recommends to disable the DHE key exchange until a technological solution is found, using methods listed in the additional information section. While we use DEFAULT_SUSE as a default cipher set, removing DHE unconditionally could break existing setups. Thus SUSE will not remove it proactively at this time.

A workaround is to temporary disable DHE key exchange and only use ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman) in SSL / TLS / HTTPS using network services. System administrators should check first if this causes interoperability issues.

References

5.7 boothole-2: GRUB2 UEFI secure boot bypass issues

Various security researchers and the GRUB2 team have published more security issues in GRUB2, which can be used to bypass UEFI secure boot chain. These security issues have the same scope as the BootHole issues from 2020.

This attack requires root access to the boot loader used in Linux operating systems, GRUB2. It bypasses normal Secure Boot protections to persistently install malicious code which cannot be detected by the operating system. Given the need for root access to the boot loader, the described attack appears to have limited relevance for most cloud computing, data center and personal device scenarios, unless these systems are already compromised by another known attack. However, it does create an exposure when untrusted users can access a machine, for example bad actors in classified computing scenarios or computers in public spaces operating in unattended kiosk mode. These are scenarios which Secure Boot was intended to protect against.

Solution

Software and hardware vendors are closely collaborating to ensure that sophisticated attackers cannot reinstall old versions of GRUB2. Over time, vendors are going to update cryptographic keys in the BIOS for new computers, and to provide so-called DBX Exclusion List updates for existing computers. These can prevent systems that are not patched and old installation media from starting. Make sure you have installed all relevant boot loader and operating system updates for BootHole before installing a BIOS or DBX Exclusion List update to ensure continuity.

SUSE has released fixed GRUB2 packages which close the vulnerabilities for all of SUSE's Linux-based products. SUSE has also released the corresponding Linux kernel packages, cloud image and installation media updates.

References

5.8 Sequoia (kernel root exploit in fs layer)

Security researchers from Qualys have identified a security issue in the Linux Kernel where local attackers could reliably exploit an integer overflow to execute code in the kernel and so escalate privileges. fs/seq_file.c in the Linux kernel 3.16 through 5.13.x before 5.13.4 does not properly restrict seq buffer allocations, leading to an integer overflow, an Out-of-bounds Write, and escalation to root by an unprivileged user, aka CID-8cae8cd89f05.

Qualys refers to this vulnerability as Sequoia: A deep root in Linux's filesystem layer (CVE2021-33909).

Solution

SUSE advises all customers to update to the latest released kernel after July 20, 2021.

References

5.9 FRAGATTACKS - several WLAN vulnerabilities

Security Researcher Mathy Vanhoef discovered various attacks against Wi-Fi (802.11) stacks and against the Wi-Fi standard related to Wi-Fi fragments. This vulnerability is documented on the Web site https://www.fragattacks.com/ and is called FRAGATTACKS.

This set of vulnerabilities can allow local attackers in Wi-Fi range to inject traffic even in encrypted Wi-Fi networks, or get access to information of other users in the same Wi-Fi network. If the system is not using Wi-Fi, it is not affected. These issues largely affect the hardware / firmware of Wi-Fi cards.

Two CVEs are also included in the mac80211 stack of Linux, and will be addressed by updates to the Linux kernel. These issues have received CVE-2020-24586 and CVE-2020-24587. These and others CVEs are fixed in the various Wi-Fi firmware. We will release the respective updates when they become available from the Wi-Fi card vendors Linux support, via kernel-firmware updates.

Solution

SUSE advises all customers to install the published updates required to fix the following vulnerabilities:

  • CVE-2020-24586: Fragmentation cache not cleared on reconnection

  • CVE-2020-24587: Reassembling fragments encrypted under different keys

  • CVE-2020-24588: Accepting non-SPP A-MSDU frames, which leads to payload being parsed as an L2 frame under an A-MSDU bit toggling attack

  • CVE-2020-26139: Forwarding EAPOL from unauthenticated sender

  • CVE-2020-26140: Accepting plaintext data frames in protected networks

  • CVE-2020-26141: Not verifying TKIP MIC of fragmented frames

  • CVE-2020-26142: Processing fragmented frames as full frames

  • CVE-2020-26143: Accepting fragmented plaintext frames in protected networks

  • CVE-2020-26144: Always accepting unencrypted A-MSDU frames that start with RFC1042 header with EAPOL ethertype

  • CVE-2020-26145: Accepting plaintext broadcast fragments as full frames

  • CVE-2020-26146: Reassembling encrypted fragments with non-consecutive packet numbers

  • CVE-2020-26147: Reassembling mixed encrypted/plaintext fragments

6 Vulnerability Management in 2021

The SUSE Solution Security team observed a steady amount of vulnerabilities hitting our products on an annual basis. More and improved tools are now available for finding out zero-day vulnerabilities and scanning for existing vulnerabilities. Such instruments can validate and report back if the application code written is following the standard security best practices or there are major gaps in potential attack vectors such as buffer overflow, denial of service or unwanted elevated access. It is obvious that developers are becoming more and more security aware and the quality of the code being developed has greatly improved in both quantity and quality. While we notice an increasing number of important vulnerabilities, the number of critical vulnerabilities is going down year over year.

Table 2: Vulnerabilities with a unique CVE identified, impacting SUSE products
YearModerateImportantCritical
202178159148
202083056048
2019 100349555
Table 3: Security updates and patches released to fix these vulnerabilities
YearModerateImportantCritical
202140188768
202040277580
2019 43255877
Security updates and patches released per month
Figure 1: Security updates and patches released per month

Key Performance Indicators

  • 100 percent of all high impact vulnerabilities had an update or a patch released to our customers within five business days.

  • 97 percent of all vulnerabilities scored CVSS 4.0 and above had an update or a patch released to our customers within 180 calendar days.

  • 88 percent of all vulnerabilities scored CVSS 4.0 and above had an update or a patch released to our customers within 90 calendar days.

7 Secure Software Supply Chain

Securing our software supply chain is a top priority for SUSE to ensure that our customers are protected from security risks, known and zero-day vulnerabilities. Ensuring that no threat actor can inject malicious code within our build service systems is certified by industry leading security certifications. Our teams continually work to certify all SUSE products, and develop security solutions to ensure the highest level of trust and reliability for our customers.

Common Criteria (CC), also known as the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation, is an international set of specifications and guidelines designed by the signatories of the Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement (CCRA), to evaluate information security products and systems. It was developed to ensure that products and systems meet a predefined security standard for government deployments. Products and systems that have been successfully tested and evaluated by a licensed laboratory are awarded a Common Criteria certification. On November 11th 2021, SUSE was awarded with the Common Criteria Certification (NIAP OSPP) for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2. This certification is mandatory for work with the United States (US) Federal Government. It demonstrates compliance to NIAP Protection Profile for General Purpose Operating Systems, Version 4.2.1 (CCEVS-VR-PP-0047) with the Extended Package for Secure Shell (SSH), Version 1.0 (CCES-VR-PP-0039). This certification extends our Common Criteria Certification track by US Compliance Regulations enabling US federal entities to profit from SUSE’s Certified Secure Software Supply Chain while complying with all necessary national regulations.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed the FIPS 140-2 security standard. It outlines the security requirements that must be satisfied by cryptographic modules, providing four increasing, qualitative levels intended to cover a wide range of potential applications and environments. On October 27th 2021, NIST awarded SUSE a validation certificate for the Libica Cryptographic Module, a software-hybrid module that provides general purpose cryptographic algorithms to applications running in the user space of the underlying operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the IBM Z mainframes. More details about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM Z can be found at https://www.suse.com/products/systemz/.

Many other industry standards like Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Requirements Guides (SRGs) and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) depend on FIPS 140-2 certified cryptography modules. On July 22nd 2021, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) under the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) in compliance with the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2, has validated all modules within SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2. More details can be found at https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP3/html/SLES-all/cha-security-fips.html .

On July 8th, 2021, SUSE announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 is now EAL 4+ level certified for IBM Z, Arm and x86-64. SUSE is the only provider of a recent general-purpose Linux operating system with a secure software supply chain that is certified Common Criteria EAL 4+ for all these platforms. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 was certified by BSI, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, based on an evaluation conducted by atsec information security. To achieve the certifications, the SUSE products, and processes for developing and maintaining its products, passed a rigorous security evaluation performed by Atsec Information Security. The certificates were issued by Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) the German Federal Office for IT Security. The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation is an international standard (ISO/IEC 15408), recognized by 26 countries (CCRA) worldwide. Details regarding SUSE’s full Common Criteria Part 3 conformant EAL 4 augmented by ALC_FLR.3 Systematic Flaw Remediation certification are listed at https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Zertifikate_CC/CC/Betriebssysteme/1151.html .

On January 29th 2021, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has released the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG). Details regarding STIG can be found at https://www.suse.com/c/sles-15-security-technical-implementation-guide-stig/ .

8 About SUSE

SUSE is a global leader in innovative, reliable and enterprise-grade open source solutions, relied upon by more than 60% of the Fortune 500 to power their mission-critical workloads. We specialize in Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes Management, and Edge solutions, and collaborate with partners and communities to empower our customers to innovate everywhere – from the data center, to the cloud, to the edge and beyond. SUSE puts the open back in open source, giving customers the agility to tackle innovation challenges today and the freedom to evolve their strategy and solutions tomorrow. The company employs nearly 2000 people globally and is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. For more information, visit https://www.suse.com.

9 Forward-looking statements

Any statements in this document about future expectations, plans and prospects for the company, including statements containing the words aims, targets, will, believes, anticipates, plansexpects, and similar expressions, may constitute forward-looking statements and should be read with caution.

Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including competitive landscape, development of customer deals, reliance upon customer relationships, management of growth and acquisitions, the possibility of undetected software issues, the risks of impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturns, pricing pressures and the viability of the Internet. In addition, any forward-looking statements included herein represent views as of the date of this document and these views could change. SUSE does not have any obligation to update its forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to change and should not be relied upon as representing the SUSE’s views as of any date other than the publication date of this document.

10 Legal notice

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