Log in Start free

Vulnerability · Published Aug 31, 2022 · Assigned by mitre

CVE-2022-38153

Medium 5.9

In plain English

A medium-severity security flaw in the wolfssl package (Debian). There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 2.5% (higher than 85% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS NVD)5.9Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)2.5%top 15.3% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsnot in CISA KEV
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

An issue was discovered in wolfSSL before 5.5.0 (when --enable-session-ticket is used); however, only version 5.3.0 is exploitable. Man-in-the-middle attackers or a malicious server can crash TLS 1.2 clients during a handshake. If an attacker injects a large ticket (more than 256 bytes) into a NewSessionTicket message in a TLS 1.2 handshake, and the client has a non-empty session cache, the session cache frees a pointer that points to unallocated memory, causing the client to crash with a "free(): invalid pointer" message. NOTE: It is likely that this is also exploitable during TLS 1.3 handshakes between a client and a malicious server. With TLS 1.3, it is not possible to exploit this as a man-in-the-middle.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian:12wolfssl5.5.3-1DEBIAN-CVE-2022-38153
Debian:13wolfssl5.5.3-1DEBIAN-CVE-2022-38153
Ubuntu:22.04:LTSwolfsslno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2022-38153
Ubuntu:24.04:LTSwolfsslno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2022-38153
Ubuntu:25.10wolfsslno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2022-38153
Ubuntu:26.04:LTSwolfsslno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2022-38153
Ubuntu:26.10wolfsslno fix listedUBUNTU-CVE-2022-38153

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
n/a n/a n/a

References