Know every vulnerabilitybefore it knows you.
DevGuard continuously monitors your dependencies and alerts you when CVEs like this one affect your stack — with real-time threat intelligence built for developers.
GHSA-x4gp-pqpj-f43q
No affected components available
Timing variability of any kind is problematic when working with potentially secret values such as elliptic curve scalars, and such issues can potentially leak private keys and other secrets. Such a problem was recently discovered in curve25519-dalek.
The Scalar29::sub (32-bit) and Scalar52::sub (64-bit) functions contained usage of a mask value inside a loop where LLVM saw an opportunity to insert a branch instruction (jns on x86) to conditionally bypass this code section when the mask value is set to zero as can be seen in godbolt:
- 32-bit (see L106): https://godbolt.org/z/zvaWxzvqv
- 64-bit (see L48): https://godbolt.org/z/PczYj7Pda
A similar problem was recently discovered in the Kyber reference implementation:
https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/pqc-forum/c/hqbtIGFKIpU/m/cnE3pbueBgAJ
As discussed on that thread, one portable solution, which is also used in this PR, is to introduce a volatile read as an optimization barrier, which prevents the compiler from optimizing it away.
The fix can be validated in godbolt here:
- 32-bit: https://godbolt.org/z/jc9j7eb8E
- 64-bit: https://godbolt.org/z/x8d46Yfah
The problem was discovered and the solution independently verified by Alexander Wagner alexander.wagner@aisec.fraunhofer.de and Lea Themint lea.thiemt@tum.de using their DATA tool:
https://github.com/Fraunhofer-AISEC/DATA
The vulnerability requires local access to the device to be exploited. It is difficult for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability and may require special conditions. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a low impact on the confidentiality of the information.
Limited exploitation activity has been observed. Close monitoring and planned remediation are recommended.
Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
Browse More
Continuously monitor your dependencies and get alerted when vulnerabilities like this one affect your stack.
Checkout DevGuard