notation-go has excessive memory allocation on verification

CVE-2023-25656 → View on GitHub ↗ View on CVE.org ↗ View on NVD ↗

Description

Impact

notation-go users will find their application using excessive memory when verifying signatures and the application will be finally killed, and thus availability is impacted.

Patches

The problem has been patched in the release v1.0.0-rc.3. Users should upgrade their notation-go packages to v1.0.0-rc.3 or above.

Workarounds

Users can review their own trust policy file and check if the identity string contains =#. Meanwhile, users should only put trusted certificates in their trust stores referenced by their own trust policy files, and make sure the authenticity validation is set to enforce

Credits

The notation-go project would like to thank Adam Korczynski (@AdamKorcz) for responsibly disclosing this issue during a security fuzzing audit sponsored by CNCF and Shiwei Zhang (@shizhMSFT) for root cause analysis and detailed vulnerability report.

References

Basic information

Type
reviewed
Severity
high
Advisory on GitHub
Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory
Open repository advisory ↗
Source code
Browse source ↗
Published (advisory)
2023-02-22 00:03:49 UTC
Updated
2023-07-12 14:17:18 UTC
GitHub reviewed
2023-02-22 00:03:49 UTC
NVD published
2023-02-20

EPSS Score

Score Percentile
0.18% 40.11%

CVSS Scores

Base score Version Severity Vector
7.5 3.1 —
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Once they can reach the bug, pulling it off is straightforward—no weird race conditions or rare setup.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough.
User interaction (UI:N)
Nobody has to click “OK” or open a trap file; it can work without a victim helping.
Scope (S:U)
Damage stays in the same “trust bubble” as the broken component—no big spill into unrelated systems.
Confidentiality (C:N)
Doesn’t really leak secrets in a meaningful way.
Integrity (I:N)
Data isn’t meaningfully altered or forged.
Availability (A:H)
Could take the service down hard or make it unusable for people who depend on it.

Identifiers

Type Value
GHSA GHSA-87x9-7grx-m28v ↗
CVE CVE-2023-25656 ↗

CWEs

CWE id Name
CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

Credits

  • AdamKorcz (analyst)
  • shizhMSFT (analyst)

Affected packages (1)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem Package Vulnerable range First patched Vulnerable functions
go github.com/notaryproject/notation-go < 1.0.0-rc.3 1.0.0-rc.3 —

References

cvelogic Threat Intelligence