CVE-2018-16875 Denial of service in golang

Medium 5.9 Published Updated

Attackers can cause CPU denial of service in Go TLS servers and clients by crafting pathological inputs during certificate chain verification.

Exploited in the wild
Not known
Login needed
Not needed
Attackable
Over the internet
Victim action needed
Not needed
Fix
Available

What is CVE-2018-16875?

CVE-2018-16875 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Golang Go, published on 14 Dec 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The crypto/x509 package of Go before 1.10.6 and 1.11.x before 1.11.3 does not limit the amount of work performed for each chain verification, which might allow attackers to craft pathological inputs leading to a CPU denial of service. Go TLS servers accepting client certificates and TLS clients are affected.

Weakness: CWE-295, CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-16875?

9 open source packages ship an affected version, including rustls-webpki, stdlib and webpki. It affects 2 products.

PackageAffectedFixed in
rustls-webpki crates.ioAll versions0.100.2
rustls-webpki crates.ioAll versions0.100.2
rustls-webpki crates.ioFrom 0.0.0-00.100.2, 0.101.4
rustls-webpki crates.ioFrom 0.101.00.101.4
rustls-webpki crates.ioFrom 0.101.00.101.4
stdlib GoAll versions1.10.6, 1.11.3
3 more packages
webpki crates.ioAll versions0.22.2
webpki crates.ioAll versions0.22.2
webpki crates.ioFrom 0.0.0-00.22.2

Products include Golang Go, Opensuse Leap.

How do I fix CVE-2018-16875?

Upgrade rustls-webpki to a fixed version for your release line: 0.100.2 or 0.101.4.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2018-16875 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-16875 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

All Golang Go vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as AZL-79028, AZL-98928, GHSA-8gx8-4ch8-vgp8, GHSA-8qv2-5vq6-g2g7, GHSA-fh2r-99q2-6mmg, GO-2022-0191 and 3 more.

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