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Security Advisories: GSA_kwCzR0hTQS00Z3J3LW0yOHItcTI4Nc4ABCFQ

rPGP Potential Resource Exhaustion when handling Untrusted Messages

During a security audit, Radically Open Security discovered two vulnerabilities which allow attackers to trigger resource exhaustion vulnerabilities in rpgp by providing crafted messages. This affects general message parsing and decryption with symmetric keys.

Impact

Affected rpgp versions do not correctly set upper limits on the total reserved amount of memory when parsing long sequences of partial OpenPGP packets, which can grow to to several GiB in size. Additionally, up to 4GiB of memory is reserved for OpenPGP packets of fixed size with large length fields, even if less data is received.
Depending on existing message size restrictions and available system resources, this can cause out-of-memory conditions and crash the rpgp process or cause other system instability through memory resource exhaustion when parsing crafted messages.

Affected rpgp versions are susceptible to excessive memory allocation with values of up to 2TiB or long processing times for some decryption operations which involve the Argon2 function. An attacker can provide a valid Symmetric Key Encrypted Session Key packet (SKESK) which uses Argon2 for String-to-Key hashing with parameters that are excessive, but within specification limits of the RFC9580 OpenPGP standard. Since rpgp did not further restrict the Argon2 parameters, this can cause out-of-memory conditions and crash the rpgp process. Under some conditions, the memory resource exhaustion may trigger other system instability. Alternatively, this can make the program unresponsive via long computations. The attacker needs to trick a victim into attempting decryption, but does not require knowledge of the symmetric secret used by the victim.

There is no impact to confidentiality or integrity security properties.

Versions and Patches

The impact details on the message parsing component varies with different versions. We've confirmed some of the problematic behavior on older versions such as v0.10.0 and see all recent versions as affected in some form.

The affected Argon2 functionality was introduced with v0.12.0-alpha.1, earlier versions are not vulnerable.

The vulnerabilities have been fixed with version 0.14.2. We recommend all users to upgrade to this version.

References

The security audit was made possible by the NLnet Foundation NGI Zero Core grant program for rpgp.

Permalink: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-4grw-m28r-q285
JSON: https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories/GSA_kwCzR0hTQS00Z3J3LW0yOHItcTI4Nc4ABCFQ
Source: GitHub Advisory Database
Origin: Unspecified
Severity: High
Classification: General
Published: 13 days ago
Updated: 13 days ago

CVSS Score: 7.5
CVSS vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS Percentage: 0.00043
EPSS Percentile: 0.10595

Identifiers: GHSA-4grw-m28r-q285, CVE-2024-53857
References:

• https://github.com/rpgp/rpgp/security/advisories/GHSA-4grw-m28r-q285
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-53857
• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-4grw-m28r-q285

Repository: https://github.com/rpgp/rpgp
Blast Radius: 17.7

Affected Packages