Vigie VulnDBEuropean-hosted Vulnerability DB

CVE-2023-3817

Excessive time spent checking DH q parameter value

At a glance

Severity
MEDIUM 5.3
EPSS
EPSS 3.05 % · percentile 87 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
openssl
NVD status
Modified

Description

Issue summary: Checking excessively long DH keys or parameters may be very slow. Impact summary: Applications that use the functions DH_check(), DH_check_ex() or EVP_PKEY_param_check() to check a DH key or DH parameters may experience long delays. Where the key or parameters that are being checked have been obtained from an untrusted source this may lead to a Denial of Service. The function DH_check() performs various checks on DH parameters. After fixing CVE-2023-3446 it was discovered that a large q parameter value can also trigger an overly long computation during some of these checks. A correct q value, if present, cannot be larger than the modulus p parameter, thus it is unnecessary to perform these checks if q is larger than p. An application that calls DH_check() and supplies a key or parameters obtained from an untrusted source could be vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack. The function DH_check() is itself called by a number of other OpenSSL functions. An application calling any of those other functions may similarly be affected. The other functions affected by this are DH_check_ex() and EVP_PKEY_param_check(). Also vulnerable are the OpenSSL dhparam and pkeyparam command line applications when using the "-check" option. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected by this issue. The OpenSSL 3.0 and 3.1 FIPS providers are not affected by this issue.

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LCISA-ADP
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LNVD · nvd@nist.gov (Primary)
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LNVD · 134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0 (Secondary)

Weaknesses (CWE)

European references

CERT-FR advisories

Affected configurations (NVD CPE)

Affected products

ProductVersions
OpenSSL · OpenSSLaffected 3.1.0 < 3.1.2 ; affected 3.0.0 < 3.0.10 ; affected 1.1.1 < 1.1.1v ; affected 1.0.2 < 1.0.2zi

References

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
CERT-FR (ANSSI)Licence Ouverte / Etalab 2.0
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD