CVE Catalog

CVE-2021-3711

CriticalCVSS 9.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Very high risk
87.82%

100th percentile - higher than 100% of all known CVEs

Summary

A bug in the SM2 decryption implementation in OpenSSL causes the first call to EVP_PKEY_decrypt() to return a buffer size smaller than actually required, leading to a buffer overflow of up to 62 bytes on the second call. An attacker can exploit this to alter data or cause application crashes.

Risk Assessment

Buffer overflow may allow an attacker to modify application data or cause crashes, potentially leading to integrity compromise or denial of service.

Recommendation

Update OpenSSL to version 1.1.1l or later, which includes the fix for this vulnerability.

Other vulnerabilities in OpenSSL

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In order to decrypt SM2 encrypted data an application is expected to call the API function EVP_PKEY_decrypt(). Typically an application will call this function twice. The first time, on entry, the "out" parameter can be NULL and, on exit, the "outlen" parameter is populated with the buffer size required to hold the decrypted plaintext. The application can then allocate a sufficiently sized buffer and call EVP_PKEY_decrypt() again, but this time passing a non-NULL value for the "out" parameter. A bug in the implementation of the SM2 decryption code means that the calculation of the buffer size required to hold the plaintext returned by the first call to EVP_PKEY_decrypt() can be smaller than the actual size required by the second call. This can lead to a buffer overflow when EVP_PKEY_decrypt() is called by the application a second time with a buffer that is too small. A malicious attacker who is able present SM2 content for decryption to an application could cause attacker chosen data to overflow the buffer by up to a maximum of 62 bytes altering the contents of other data held after the buffer, possibly changing application behaviour or causing the application to crash. The location of the buffer is application dependent but is typically heap allocated. Fixed in OpenSSL 1.1.1l (Affected 1.1.1-1.1.1k).

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS