CVE-2024-9143

A flaw was found in OpenSSL. Use of the low-level GF(2^m) elliptic curve APIs with untrusted explicit values for the field polynomial can lead to out-of-bounds memory reads or writes. X9.62 encoding is used for ECC keys in X.509 certificates, so problematic inputs cannot occur in the context of processing X.509 certificates. Any problematic use-cases would have to be using an "exotic" curve encoding.

Applications working with "exotic" explicit binary (GF(2^m)) curve parameters make it possible to represent invalid field polynomials with a zero constant term via the affected APIs (EC_GROUP_new_curve_GF2m(), EC_GROUP_new_from_params(), and various supporting BN_GF2m_*() functions) may terminate abruptly as a result of reading or writing outside of array bounds.

Openssl, compat-openssl10, and compat-openssl11 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9 are unaffected by this flaw, because the vulnerability is in code for binary field elliptic curves, which RHEL has never enabled.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.