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CVE intelligence

CVE-2023-6237

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Apr 25, 2024Sources checked Sep 30, 2026
5.9MEDIUMCVSS out of 10
What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2023-6237 and is rated Medium severity with a CVSS score of 5.9. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

What to do next

Remediation and response

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog
EPSS2.3%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability
Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field
Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships
Overview

What is CVE-2023-6237?

Issue summary: Checking excessively long invalid RSA public keys may take a long time. Impact summary: Applications that use the function EVP_PKEY_public_check() to check RSA public keys may experience long delays. Where the key that is being checked has been obtained from an untrusted source this may lead to a Denial of Service. When function EVP_PKEY_public_check() is called on RSA public keys, a computation is done to confirm that the RSA modulus, n, is composite. For valid RSA keys, n is a product of two or more large primes and this computation completes quickly. However, if n is an overly large prime, then this computation would take a long time. An application that calls EVP_PKEY_public_check() and supplies an RSA key obtained from an untrusted source could be vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack. The function EVP_PKEY_public_check() is not called from other OpenSSL functions however it is called from the OpenSSL pkey command line application. For that reason that application is also vulnerable if used with the '-pubin' and '-check' options on untrusted data. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected by this issue. The OpenSSL 3.0 and 3.1 FIPS providers are affected by this issue.