Vulnerabilities > CVE-2023-4421 - Information Exposure Through Discrepancy vulnerability in Mozilla NSS

047910
CVSS 6.5 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
LOW
Confidentiality impact
HIGH
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE
network
low complexity
mozilla
CWE-203

Summary

The NSS code used for checking PKCS#1 v1.5 was leaking information useful in mounting Bleichenbacher-like attacks. Both the overall correctness of the padding as well as the length of the encrypted message was leaking through timing side-channel. By sending large number of attacker-selected ciphertexts, the attacker would be able to decrypt a previously intercepted PKCS#1 v1.5 ciphertext (for example, to decrypt a TLS session that used RSA key exchange), or forge a signature using the victim's key. The issue was fixed by implementing the implicit rejection algorithm, in which the NSS returns a deterministic random message in case invalid padding is detected, as proposed in the Marvin Attack paper. This vulnerability affects NSS < 3.61.

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)