Vulnerabilities > CVE-2023-46129 - Missing Required Cryptographic Step vulnerability in Nats Server and Nkeys

047910
CVSS 7.5 - HIGH
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
HIGH
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE
network
low complexity
nats
CWE-325
NVD
Published: 2023-10-31
Updated: 2023-11-29

Summary

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.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Nats
2

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Subvert Code-signing Facilities
    Because languages use code signing facilities to vouch for code's identity and to thus tie code to its assigned privileges within an environment, subverting this mechanism can be instrumental in an attacker escalating privilege. Any means of subverting the way that a virtual machine enforces code signing classifies for this style of attack. This pattern does not include circumstances through which a signing key has been stolen.

References