OpenSSL Advisory: November 6th, 2023

OpenSSL have published a security advisory. Here's how it affects BoringSSL:

CVESummarySeverity in OpenSSLImpact to BoringSSL
CVE-2023-5678Excessive time spent in DH check / generation with large Q parameter valueLowAddressed in previous advisory. See below.

CVE-2023-5678

This was one of the issues we discovered in the course of addressing CVE-2023-3446 and CVE-2023-3817. BoringSSL's original fix for those CVEs additionally addressed this issue in August 2023.

Per our August advisory, these issues do not impact our TLS implementation. Although the TLS 1.2 DHE construction did not correctly handle domain parameters, we removed DHE ciphers in 2017 for related reasons. They additionally do not affect callers that correctly use Diffie-Hellman with trusted domain parameters.

As only incorrect uses are impacted, BoringSSL considers these changes to be a hardening measure, not a security fix. In particular, these checks do not ensure the group is suitable for use with Diffie-Hellman—they only enforce a DoS bound. Ultimately, callers of legacy Diffie-Hellman are responsible for selecting valid domain parameters. Callers are recommended to migrate to modern primitives, such as X25519 or ECDH with P-256.

For more details, see our August advisory.