OpenSSL Releases Patch for High-Severity Bug that Could Lead to RCE Attacks

The maintainers of the OpenSSL project have released patches to address a high-severity bug in the cryptographic library that could potentially lead to remote code execution under certain scenarios.

The issue, now assigned the identifier CVE-2022-2274, has been described as a case of heap memory corruption with RSA private key operation that was introduced in OpenSSL version 3.0.4 released on June 21, 2022.

First released in 1998, OpenSSL is a general-purpose cryptography library that offers open-source implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, enabling users to generate private keys, create certificate signing requests (CSRs), install SSL/TLS certificates.

"SSL/TLS servers or other servers using 2048 bit RSA private keys running on machines supporting AVX512IFMA instructions of the X86_64 architecture are affected by this issue," the advisory noted.

Calling it a "serious bug in the RSA implementation," the maintainers said the flaw could lead to memory corruption during computation that could be weaponized by an attacker to trigger remote code execution on the machine performing the computation.

Xi Ruoyao, a Ph.D. student at Xidian University, has been credited with reporting the flaw to OpenSSL on June 22, 2022. Users of the library are recommended to upgrade to OpenSSL version 3.0.5 to mitigate any potential threats.

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