OpenSSL 3.1.0 < 3.1.8 Vulnerability

medium Nessus Plugin ID 209154

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Synopsis

The remote service is affected by a vulnerability.

Description

The version of OpenSSL installed on the remote host is prior to 3.1.8. It is, therefore, affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the 3.1.8 advisory.

- Issue summary: Use of the low-level GF(2^m) elliptic curve APIs with untrusted explicit values for the field polynomial can lead to out-of-bounds memory reads or writes. Impact summary: Out of bound memory writes can lead to an application crash or even a possibility of a remote code execution, however, in all the protocols involving Elliptic Curve Cryptography that we're aware of, either only named curves are supported, or, if explicit curve parameters are supported, they specify an X9.62 encoding of binary (GF(2^m)) curves that can't represent problematic input values. Thus the likelihood of existence of a vulnerable application is low. In particular, the X9.62 encoding is used for ECC keys in X.509 certificates, so problematic inputs cannot occur in the context of processing X.509 certificates. Any problematic use-cases would have to be using an exotic curve encoding. The affected APIs include:
EC_GROUP_new_curve_GF2m(), EC_GROUP_new_from_params(), and various supporting BN_GF2m_*() functions.
Applications working with exotic explicit binary (GF(2^m)) curve parameters, that make it possible to represent invalid field polynomials with a zero constant term, via the above or similar APIs, may terminate abruptly as a result of reading or writing outside of array bounds. Remote code execution cannot easily be ruled out. The FIPS modules in 3.3, 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue.
(CVE-2024-9143)

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Upgrade to OpenSSL version 3.1.8 or later.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 209154

File Name: openssl_3_1_8.nasl

Version: 1.2

Type: combined

Agent: windows, macosx, unix

Family: Web Servers

Published: 10/16/2024

Updated: 11/11/2024

Configuration: Enable thorough checks

Supported Sensors: Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 2.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.8

Temporal Score: 5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2024-9143

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Temporal Score: 3.8

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/a:openssl:openssl

Required KB Items: installed_sw/OpenSSL

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 10/16/2024

Vulnerability Publication Date: 10/16/2024

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2024-9143

Detections

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