Vigie VulnDBEuropean-hosted Vulnerability DB

CVE-2023-6237

Excessive time spent checking invalid RSA public keys

At a glance

Severity
MEDIUM 5.9
EPSS
EPSS 2.30 % · percentile 83 (2026-10-27)
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
openssl
NVD status
Deferred

Description

Issue summary: Checking excessively long invalid RSA public keys may take a long time. Impact summary: Applications that use the function EVP_PKEY_public_check() to check RSA public keys may experience long delays. Where the key that is being checked has been obtained from an untrusted source this may lead to a Denial of Service. When function EVP_PKEY_public_check() is called on RSA public keys, a computation is done to confirm that the RSA modulus, n, is composite. For valid RSA keys, n is a product of two or more large primes and this computation completes quickly. However, if n is an overly large prime, then this computation would take a long time. An application that calls EVP_PKEY_public_check() and supplies an RSA key obtained from an untrusted source could be vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack. The function EVP_PKEY_public_check() is not called from other OpenSSL functions however it is called from the OpenSSL pkey command line application. For that reason that application is also vulnerable if used with the '-pubin' and '-check' options on untrusted data. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected by this issue. The OpenSSL 3.0 and 3.1 FIPS providers are affected by this issue.

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HCISA-ADP
CVSS 3.1MEDIUM 5.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNVD · 134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0 (Secondary)

Weaknesses (CWE)

European references

CERT-FR advisories

Affected products

ProductVersions
OpenSSL · OpenSSLaffected 3.0.0 < 3.0.13 ; affected 3.1.0 < 3.1.5 ; affected 3.2.0 < 3.2.1

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