Package Instance

Improper Certificate Validation
Applications that use a non-default option when verifying certificates may be vulnerable to an attack from a malicious CA to circumvent certain checks. Invalid certificate policies in leaf certificates are silently ignored by OpenSSL and other certificate policy checks are skipped for that certificate. A malicious CA could use this to deliberately assert invalid certificate policies in order to circumvent policy checking on the certificate altogether. 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.

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Issue summary: Processing some specially crafted ASN.1 object identifiers or
data containing them may be very slow.

Impact summary: Applications that use OBJ_obj2txt() directly, or use any of
the OpenSSL subsystems OCSP, PKCS7/SMIME, CMS, CMP/CRMF or TS with no message
size limit may experience notable to very long delays when processing those
messages, which may lead to a Denial of Service.

An OBJECT IDENTIFIER is composed of a series of numbers - sub-identifiers -
most of which have no size limit. OBJ_obj2txt() may be used to translate
an ASN.1 OBJECT IDENTIFIER given in DER encoding form (using the OpenSSL
type ASN1_OBJECT) to its canonical numeric text form, which are the
sub-identifiers of the OBJECT IDENTIFIER in decimal form, separated by
periods.

When one of the sub-identifiers in the OBJECT IDENTIFIER is very large
(these are sizes that are seen as absurdly large, taking up tens or hundreds
of KiBs), the translation to a decimal number in text may take a very long
time. The time complexity is O(n^2) with 'n' being the size of the
sub-identifiers in bytes (*).

With OpenSSL 3.0, support to fetch cryptographic algorithms using names /
identifiers in string form was introduced. This includes using OBJECT
IDENTIFIERs in canonical numeric text form as identifiers for fetching
algorithms.

Such OBJECT IDENTIFIERs may be received through the ASN.1 structure
AlgorithmIdentifier, which is commonly used in multiple protocols to specify
what cryptographic algorithm should be used to sign or verify, encrypt or
decrypt, or digest passed data.

Applications that call OBJ_obj2txt() directly with untrusted data are
affected, with any version of OpenSSL. If the use is for the mere purpose
of display, the severity is considered low.

In OpenSSL 3.0 and newer, this affects the subsystems OCSP, PKCS7/SMIME,
CMS, CMP/CRMF or TS. It also impacts anything that processes X.509
certificates, including simple things like verifying its signature.

The impact on TLS is relatively low, because all versions of OpenSSL have a
100KiB limit on the peer's certificate chain. Additionally, this only
impacts clients, or servers that have explicitly enabled client
authentication.

In OpenSSL 1.1.1 and 1.0.2, this only affects displaying diverse objects,
such as X.509 certificates. This is assumed to not happen in such a way
that it would cause a Denial of Service, so these versions are considered
not affected by this issue in such a way that it would be cause for concern,
and the severity is therefore considered low.

Improper Certificate Validation
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 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.

Double Free
The function PEM_read_bio_ex() reads a PEM file from a BIO and parses and decodes the "name" (e.g. "CERTIFICATE"), any header data and the payload data. If the function succeeds then the "name_out", "header" and "data" arguments are populated with pointers to buffers containing the relevant decoded data. The caller is responsible for freeing those buffers. It is possible to construct a PEM file that results in 0 bytes of payload data. In this case PEM_read_bio_ex() will return a failure code but will populate the header argument with a pointer to a buffer that has already been freed. If the caller also frees this buffer then a double free will occur. This will most likely lead to a crash. This could be exploited by an attacker who has the ability to supply malicious PEM files for parsing to achieve a denial of service attack. The functions PEM_read_bio() and PEM_read() are simple wrappers around PEM_read_bio_ex() and therefore these functions are also directly affected. These functions are also called indirectly by a number of other OpenSSL functions including PEM_X509_INFO_read_bio_ex() and SSL_CTX_use_serverinfo_file() which are also vulnerable. Some OpenSSL internal uses of these functions are not vulnerable because the caller does not free the header argument if PEM_read_bio_ex() returns a failure code. These locations include the PEM_read_bio_TYPE() functions as well as the decoders introduced in OpenSSL 3.0. The OpenSSL asn1parse command line application is also impacted by this issue.

Use After Free
The public API function BIO_new_NDEF is a helper function used for streaming ASN.1 data via a BIO. It is primarily used internally to OpenSSL to support the SMIME, CMS and PKCS7 streaming capabilities, but may also be called directly by end user applications. The function receives a BIO from the caller, prepends a new BIO_f_asn1 filter BIO onto the front of it to form a BIO chain, and then returns the new head of the BIO chain to the caller. Under certain conditions, for example if a CMS recipient public key is invalid, the new filter BIO is freed and the function returns a NULL result indicating a failure. However, in this case, the BIO chain is not properly cleaned up and the BIO passed by the caller still retains internal pointers to the previously freed filter BIO. If the caller then goes on to call BIO_pop() on the BIO then a use-after-free will occur. This will most likely result in a crash. This scenario occurs directly in the internal function B64_write_ASN1() which may cause BIO_new_NDEF() to be called and will subsequently call BIO_pop() on the BIO. This internal function is in turn called by the public API functions PEM_write_bio_ASN1_stream, PEM_write_bio_CMS_stream, PEM_write_bio_PKCS7_stream, SMIME_write_ASN1, SMIME_write_CMS and SMIME_write_PKCS7. Other public API functions that may be impacted by this include i2d_ASN1_bio_stream, BIO_new_CMS, BIO_new_PKCS7, i2d_CMS_bio_stream and i2d_PKCS7_bio_stream. The OpenSSL cms and smime command line applications are similarly affected.

Timing based side channel
A timing based side channel exists in the OpenSSL RSA Decryption implementation which could be sufficient to recover a plaintext across a network in a Bleichenbacher style attack. To achieve a successful decryption an attacker would have to be able to send a very large number of trial messages for decryption. The vulnerability affects all RSA padding modes: PKCS#1 v1.5, RSA-OEAP and RSASVE. For example, in a TLS connection, RSA is commonly used by a client to send an encrypted pre-master secret to the server. An attacker that had observed a genuine connection between a client and a server could use this flaw to send trial messages to the server and record the time taken to process them. After a sufficiently large number of messages the attacker could recover the pre-master secret used for the original connection and thus be able to decrypt the application data sent over that connection.

Improper Certificate Validation
The function X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() is documented to implicitly enable the certificate policy check when doing certificate verification. However the implementation of the function does not enable the check which allows certificates with invalid or incorrect policies to pass the certificate verification. As suddenly enabling the policy check could break existing deployments it was decided to keep the existing behavior of the X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() function. Instead the applications that require OpenSSL to perform certificate policy check need to use X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies() or explicitly enable the policy check by calling X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set_flags() with the X509_V_FLAG_POLICY_CHECK flag argument. Certificate policy checks are disabled by default in OpenSSL and are not commonly used by applications.