CVE-2020-12859 — Unnecessary fields in the OpenTrace/BlueTrace protocol in COVIDSafe through v1

Unnecessary fields in the OpenTrace/BlueTrace protocol in COVIDSafe through v1.0.17 allow a remote attacker to identify a device model by observing cleartext payload data. This allows re-identification of devices, especially less common phone models or those in low-density situat

01What is this vulnerability?

Unnecessary fields in the OpenTrace/BlueTrace protocol in COVIDSafe through v1.0.17 allow a remote attacker to identify a device model by observing cleartext payload data. This allows re-identification of devices, especially less common phone models or those in low-density situations.

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: 2020-05-18T04:16:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-04T12:04:22.881Z

09References

• www.health.gov.au — https://www.health.gov.au/resources/apps-and-tools/covidsafe-app
• docs.google.com — https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u5a5ersKBH6eG362atALrzuXo3zuZ70qrGomWVEC27U/…