CVE-2023-46129CWE-321CWE-325

xkeys Seal encryption used fixed key for all encryption

High · published October 30, 2023

CVSS v3.1
7.5
EPSS
0%
Percentile
29.8
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

NATS.io is a high performance open source pub-sub distributed communication technology, built for the cloud, on-premise, IoT, and edge computing. The cryptographic key handling library, nkeys, recently gained support for encryption, not just for signing/authentication. This is used in nats-server 2.10 (Sep 2023) and newer for authentication callouts. In nkeys versions 0.4.0 through 0.4.5, corresponding with NATS server versions 2.10.0 through 2.10.3, the nkeys library's `xkeys` encryption handling logic mistakenly passed an array by value into an internal function, where the function mutated that buffer to populate the encryption key to use. As a result, all encryption was actually to an all-zeros key. This affects encryption only, not signing.

FIXME: FILL IN IMPACT ON NATS-SERVER AUTH CALLOUT SECURITY. nkeys Go library 0.4.6, corresponding with NATS Server 2.10.4, has a patch for this issue. No known workarounds are available. For any application handling auth callouts in Go, if using the nkeys library, update the dependency, recompile and deploy that in lockstep.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
7.5 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00371 · 29.8th percentile
Weaknesses
CWE-321 · Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key; CWE-325 · Missing Cryptographic Step
Published
2023-10-30T23:47Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 30 OCT 23:47Z
    xkeys Seal encryption used fixed key for all encryption
    cvelistv5