Vault Shamir Secret Sharing: CacheTiming Attack (pre1.13.1)
CVE-2023-25000 Published on March 30, 2023
Vault Vulnerable to Cache-Timing Attacks During Seal and Unseal Operations
HashiCorp Vault's implementation of Shamir's secret sharing used precomputed table lookups, and was vulnerable to cache-timing attacks. An attacker with access to, and the ability to observe a large number of unseal operations on the host through a side channel may reduce the search space of a brute force effort to recover the Shamir shares. Fixed in Vault 1.13.1, 1.12.5, and 1.11.9.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2023-25000 is exploitable with local system access, requires user interaction and user privileges. This vulnerability is consided to have a high level of attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to have a high impact on confidentiality, with no impact on integrity and availability.
Weakness Type
Observable Timing Discrepancy
Two separate operations in a product require different amounts of time to complete, in a way that is observable to an actor and reveals security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not. In security-relevant contexts, even small variations in timing can be exploited by attackers to indirectly infer certain details about the product's internal operations. For example, in some cryptographic algorithms, attackers can use timing differences to infer certain properties about a private key, making the key easier to guess. Timing discrepancies effectively form a timing side channel.
Products Associated with CVE-2023-25000
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Affected Versions
HashiCorp Vault:- Version 1.13.0 and below 1.13.1 is affected.
- Version 1.12.0 and below 1.12.5 is affected.
- Version 1.11.0 and below 1.11.9 is affected.
- Before 1.11.0 is affected.
- Version 1.13.0 and below 1.13.1 is affected.
- Version 1.12.0 and below 1.12.5 is affected.
- Version 1.11.0 and below 1.11.9 is affected.
- Before 1.11.0 is affected.
Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.