CVE-2020-12457 — An issue was discovered in wolfSSL before 4

An issue was discovered in wolfSSL before 4.5.0. It mishandles the change_cipher_spec (CCS) message processing logic for TLS 1.3. If an attacker sends ChangeCipherSpec messages in a crafted way involving more than one in a row, the server becomes stuck in the ProcessReply() loop,

01What is this vulnerability?

An issue was discovered in wolfSSL before 4.5.0. It mishandles the change_cipher_spec (CCS) message processing logic for TLS 1.3. If an attacker sends ChangeCipherSpec messages in a crafted way involving more than one in a row, the server becomes stuck in the ProcessReply() loop, i.e., a denial of service.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2020-08-21T13:06:44.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-04T11:56:51.984Z

09References

• github.com — https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl/pull/2927
• github.com — https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl/releases/tag/v4.5.0-stable