November 2, 2022
The OpenSSL project has fixed two high-severity security vulnerabilities that are being tracked as CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786.
CVE-2022-3602 is an arbitrary 4-byte stack buffer overflow that may cause crashes or lead to remote code execution (RCE). CVE-2022-3786 can be exploited by malicious mail addresses to trigger a DoS via a buffer overflow.
These two vulnerabilities are found in the OpenSSL open-source encryption library for communication channels and HTTPS connections. They affect OpenSSL version 3.0.0 and higher and have been fixed in OpenSSL 3.0.7.
OpenSSL had issued warnings on the flaws since October 25, urging organizations and IT administrators to scan their environments for vulnerable instances and prepare them for patches when OpenSSL 3.0.7 is released.
Before a patch was released to fix the flaws, researchers fear that the new vulnerabilities could be another Heartbleed bug (CVE-2014-0160) that was discovered in 2014. The Heartbleed flaw let attackers to impersonate services and perform malicious activities
Contrary to what was feared, the vulnerabilities are no longer considered critical, as many modern operating systems are not as exposed to these vulnerabilities. They are not vulnerable because an exploited memory stack overwrites only an unused adjacent buffer on some Linux distributions. Also, a lot of modern platforms implement stack overflow protections.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
