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Improper Certificate Validation

CVE-2023-0464

High
7.5/10

Summary

A security vulnerability has been identified in all supported versions of OpenSSL related to the verification of X.509 certificate chains that include policy constraints. Attackers may be able to exploit this vulnerability by creating a malicious certificate chain that triggers the exponential use of computational resources, leading to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on affected systems. Policy processing is disabled by default but can be enabled by passing the "-policy" argument to the command line utilities or by calling the "X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()" function. This issue affects openssl versions 1.0.2x prior to 1.0.2zh, 1.1.1x prior to 1.1.1u, 3.0.0x prior to 3.0.9, and 3.1.0x prior to 3.1.1.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-295 - Improper Certificate Validation

The authenticity component of a web system stems from the ability to validate “Digital certificates”, which (i) establish trust between two or more entities sharing data over a network; (ii) ensure data at rest and transit is secure from unauthorized access; and (iii) check the identity of the actors that interact with the system. An application with absent or ineffective certificate validation mechanisms allows malicious users, impersonating trusted hosts, to manipulate the communication path between the client and the host, resulting in unauthorized access to data and to the application’s internal environment, and potentially enabling man-in-the-middle attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published