CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedThe python-cryptography package prior to version 49.0.0 is vulnerable to a denial of service attack due to inefficient handling of invalid certificate chains containing duplicate self-signed certificates, which can lead to excessive processing time. While the integrity of the system remains intact, the vulnerability can significantly degrade availability, making it a concern for developers and organizations utilizing this package in their applications. Users of affected versions should prioritize upgrading to version 49.0.0 or later to mitigate this risk.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD Description
python-cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers. Prior to 49.0.0, when resolving invalid certificate chains that include duplicate copies of self-signed certificates, the processing recursively invokes the same candidate, leading to an exponential blowup. Although the limitation that the chain depth cannot exceed a specified maximum depth prevents unbounded recursion and guarantees termination, an attacker-controlled certificate chain can lead the processing to easily take more than 5s to reject in testing. This amplification could form the basis for a resource exhaustion denial of service attack. The core issue arises in the recursive nature of build_chain_inner, which does not de-duplicate against previously analyzed candidates. As the correctness of validation is not affected, the integrity of a system cannot be compromised through this vector, only its availability. This issue is fixed in 49.0.0.