Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-25657 - Covert Timing Channel vulnerability in multiple products

047910
CVSS 5.9 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
HIGH
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
HIGH
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE

Summary

A flaw was found in all released versions of m2crypto, where they are vulnerable to Bleichenbacher timing attacks in the RSA decryption API via the timed processing of valid PKCS#1 v1.5 Ciphertext. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to confidentiality.

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Cross-Domain Search Timing
    An attacker initiates cross domain HTTP / GET requests and times the server responses. The timing of these responses may leak important information on what is happening on the server. Browser's same origin policy prevents the attacker from directly reading the server responses (in the absence of any other weaknesses), but does not prevent the attacker from timing the responses to requests that the attacker issued cross domain. For GET requests an attacker could for instance leverage the "img" tag in conjunction with "onload() / onerror()" javascript events. For the POST requests, an attacker could leverage the "iframe" element and leverage the "onload()" event. There is nothing in the current browser security model that prevents an attacker to use these methods to time responses to the attackers' cross domain requests. The timing for these responses leaks information. For instance, if a victim has an active session with their online e-mail account, an attacker could issue search requests in the victim's mailbox. While the attacker is not able to view the responses, based on the timings of the responses, the attacker could ask yes / no questions as to the content of victim's e-mails, who the victim e-mailed, when, etc. This is but one example; There are other scenarios where an attacker could infer potentially sensitive information from cross domain requests by timing the responses while asking the right questions that leak information.