CVE-2023-38710 Denial of service in n/a
A remote attacker can crash the Libreswan pluto daemon by sending a malformed IKEv2 packet, causing a denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-38710?
CVE-2023-38710 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in n/a, published on 25 Aug 2023. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
An issue was discovered in Libreswan before 4.12. When an IKEv2 Child SA REKEY packet contains an invalid IPsec protocol ID number of 0 or 1, an error notify INVALID_SPI is sent back. The notify payload's protocol ID is copied from the incoming packet, but the code that verifies outgoing packets fails an assertion that the protocol ID must be ESP (2) or AH(3) and causes the pluto daemon to crash and restart. NOTE: the earliest affected version is 3.20.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-38710?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Libreswan Libreswan.
How do I fix CVE-2023-38710?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
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-2023-38710 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-38710 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in n/a
- CVE-2013-7283 Race condition in n/a
- CVE-2026-12413 IKEv2 Denial of Service via malformed fragmentation
- CVE-2026-50721 IKEv1 Denial of Service via RSA-SHA1 (PKCS#1 Version 1.5 Encrypted) authentication payload
- CVE-2026-50722 IKEv2 Denial of Service via RSA-SHA1 (PKCS#1 RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5) authentication payload
- CVE-2023-30570 Denial of service in n/a
Sources
Also known as AZL-28064, AZL-34935, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-38710, GHSA-4967-9mw7-522q, UBUNTU-CVE-2023-38710.