Python/cryptography/0.4

Python Cryptography package vulnerable to Bleichenbacher timing oracle attack

A flaw was found in the python-cryptography package. This issue may allow a remote attacker to decrypt captured messages in TLS servers that use RSA key exchanges, which may lead to exposure of confidential or sensitive data.

Null pointer dereference in PKCS12 parsing

Issue summary: Processing a maliciously formatted PKCS12 file may lead OpenSSL to crash leading to a potential Denial of Service attack

Impact summary: Applications loading files in the PKCS12 format from untrusted sources might terminate abruptly.

A file in PKCS12 format can contain certificates and keys and may come from an untrusted source. The PKCS12 specification allows certain fields to be NULL, but OpenSSL does not correctly check for this case. This can lead to a NULL pointer dereference that results in OpenSSL crashing. If an application processes PKCS12 files from an untrusted source using the OpenSSL APIs then that application will be vulnerable to this issue.

OpenSSL APIs that are vulnerable to this are: PKCS12parse(), PKCS12unpackp7data(), PKCS12unpackp7encdata(), PKCS12unpackauthsafes() and PKCS12newpass().

We have also fixed a similar issue in SMIMEwritePKCS7(). However since this function is related to writing data we do not consider it security significant.

The FIPS modules in 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0 are not affected by this issue.

RSA decryption vulnerable to Bleichenbacher timing vulnerability

RSA decryption was vulnerable to Bleichenbacher timing vulnerabilities, which would impact people using RSA decryption in online scenarios. This is fixed in cryptography 3.2.

cryptography has incomplete DNS name constraint enforcement on peer names

Summary

In versions of cryptography prior to 46.0.5, DNS name constraints were only validated against SANs within child certificates, and not the peer name presented during each validation. Consequently, cryptography would allow a peer named bar.example.com to validate against a wildcard leaf certificate for *.example.com, even if the leaf's parent certificate (or upwards) contained an excluded subtree constraint for bar.example.com.

This behavior resulted from a gap between RFC 5280 (which defines Name Constraint semantics) and RFC 9525 (which defines service identity semantics): put together, neither states definitively whether Name Constraints should be applied to peer names. To close this gap, cryptography now conservatively rejects any validation where the peer name would be rejected by a name constraint if it were a SAN instead.

In practice, exploitation of this bypass requires an uncommon X.509 topology, one that the Web PKI avoids because it exhibits these kinds of problems. Consequently, we consider this a medium-to-low impact severity.

See CVE-2025-61727 for a similar bypass in Go's crypto/x509.

Remediation

Users should upgrade to 46.0.6 or newer.

Attribution

Reporter: @1seal

Improper input validation in cryptography

HKDF in cryptography before 1.5.3 returns an empty byte-string if used with a length less than algorithm.digest_size.

cryptography Vulnerable to a Subgroup Attack Due to Missing Subgroup Validation for SECT Curves

Vulnerability Summary

The public_key_from_numbers (or EllipticCurvePublicNumbers.public_key()), EllipticCurvePublicNumbers.public_key(), load_der_public_key() and load_pem_public_key() functions do not verify that the point belongs to the expected prime-order subgroup of the curve.

This missing validation allows an attacker to provide a public key point P from a small-order subgroup. This can lead to security issues in various situations, such as the most commonly used signature verification (ECDSA) and shared key negotiation (ECDH). When the victim computes the shared secret as S = [victim_private_key]P via ECDH, this leaks information about victim_private_key mod (small_subgroup_order). For curves with cofactor > 1, this reveals the least significant bits of the private key. When these weak public keys are used in ECDSA , it's easy to forge signatures on the small subgroup.

Only SECT curves are impacted by this.

Credit

This vulnerability was discovered by: - XlabAI Team of Tencent Xuanwu Lab - Atuin Automated Vulnerability Discovery Engine