CVE-2023-38712 — An issue was discovered in Libreswan 3

An issue was discovered in Libreswan 3.x and 4.x before 4.12. When an IKEv1 ISAKMP SA Informational Exchange packet contains a Delete/Notify payload followed by further Notifies that act on the ISAKMP SA, such as a duplicated Delete/Notify message, a NULL pointer dereference on t

01What is this vulnerability?

An issue was discovered in Libreswan 3.x and 4.x before 4.12. When an IKEv1 ISAKMP SA Informational Exchange packet contains a Delete/Notify payload followed by further Notifies that act on the ISAKMP SA, such as a duplicated Delete/Notify message, a NULL pointer dereference on the deleted state causes the pluto daemon to crash and restart.

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

Open the Sigma generator with a pre-filled prompt for this CVE to draft a starting detection in your stack of choice:

Open in Sigma generator →

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: 2023-08-25T00:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-02T17:46:56.799Z

09References

• github.com — https://github.com/libreswan/libreswan/tags
• libreswan.org — https://libreswan.org/security/CVE-2023-38712/