Ecosyste.ms: Advisories
An open API service providing security vulnerability metadata for many open source software ecosystems.
Security Advisories: MDE2OlNlY3VyaXR5QWR2aXNvcnlHSFNBLWc5bXAtOGczaC0zYzVj
flynn/noise has improper nonce handling yielding potential state DoS
The Go package github.com/flynn/noise
, a Noise Protocol implementation, has two bugs in nonce handling in versions prior to v1.0.0.
Issue 1: Potential nonce overflow
If 264 (~18.4 quintillion) or more messages are encrypted with Encrypt
after handshaking, the nonce counter will wrap around, causing multiple messages to be encrypted with the same key and nonce, resulting in a potentially catastrophic weakening of the security properties of the symmetric cipher.
This has been resolved in the patched version by returning ErrMaxNonce
from the CipherState
Encrypt
and Decrypt
methods before the reserved maximum nonce is reached. If this error is encountered, the program should handshake again to start with a fresh CipherState
.
Issue 2: Potential denial of service via invalid ciphertext
If an attacker sends an invalid ciphertext into one peer's Decrypt
, the nonce is incremented unconditionally. This causes a desync of the CipherState
due to a nonce mismatch between the peers, resulting in a failure to decrypt all subsequent messages. A new handshake will be required to establish a new CipherState
.
This has been resolved in the patched version by returning authentication errors from Decrypt
before incrementing the nonce.
Patches
Fixed in https://github.com/flynn/noise/pull/44, tagged as v1.0.0.
Acknowledgements
These issues were discovered during an audit of a user of this package (dnstt). Thanks to UC Berkley for commissioning the audit, and to David Fifield and Nathan Brown for their collaboration on the fixes. The fixed issues are noted in the audit as:
- UCB-02-003 Potential nonce overflow in Noise protocol
- UCB-02-006 DoS due to unconditional nonce increment
JSON: https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories/MDE2OlNlY3VyaXR5QWR2aXNvcnlHSFNBLWc5bXAtOGczaC0zYzVj
Source: GitHub Advisory Database
Origin: Unspecified
Severity: Moderate
Classification: General
Published: about 2 years ago
Updated: 8 months ago
Identifiers: GHSA-g9mp-8g3h-3c5c
References:
- https://github.com/flynn/noise/security/advisories/GHSA-g9mp-8g3h-3c5c
- https://github.com/flynn/noise/pull/44
- https://pkg.go.dev/vuln/GO-2022-0425
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-g9mp-8g3h-3c5c
Blast Radius: 0.0
Affected Packages
go:github.com/flynn/noise
Dependent packages: 1,180Dependent repositories: 2,232
Downloads:
Affected Version Ranges: < 1.0.0
Fixed in: 1.0.0
All affected versions:
All unaffected versions: 1.0.0, 1.0.1