CVE-2023-46129

Publication date 31 October 2023

Last updated 4 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Medium

Why this priority?

Cvss 3 Severity Score

7.5 · High

Score breakdown

Description

NATS.io is a high performance open source pub-sub distributed communication technology, built for the cloud, on-premise, IoT, and edge computing. The cryptographic key handling library, nkeys, recently gained support for encryption, not just for signing/authentication. This is used in nats-server 2.10 (Sep 2023) and newer for authentication callouts. In nkeys versions 0.4.0 through 0.4.5, corresponding with NATS server versions 2.10.0 through 2.10.3, the nkeys library’s `xkeys` encryption handling logic mistakenly passed an array by value into an internal function, where the function mutated that buffer to populate the encryption key to use. As a result, all encryption was actually to an all-zeros key. This affects encryption only, not signing. FIXME: FILL IN IMPACT ON NATS-SERVER AUTH CALLOUT SECURITY. nkeys Go library 0.4.6, corresponding with NATS Server 2.10.4, has a patch for this issue. No known workarounds are available. For any application handling auth callouts in Go, if using the nkeys library, update the dependency, recompile and deploy that in lockstep.

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
golang-github-nats-io-nkeys 25.10 questing
Not affected
25.04 plucky
Not affected
24.10 oracular
Not affected
24.04 LTS noble
Not affected
23.10 mantic Ignored end of life, was needs-triage
23.04 lunar Ignored end of life, was needs-triage
22.04 LTS jammy
Vulnerable
20.04 LTS focal
Vulnerable
18.04 LTS bionic Ignored end of standard support
16.04 LTS xenial Ignored end of standard support
14.04 LTS trusty Ignored end of standard support
nats-server 25.10 questing
Not affected
25.04 plucky
Not affected
24.10 oracular
Not affected
24.04 LTS noble
Not affected
23.10 mantic Ignored end of life, was needs-triage
23.04 lunar Ignored end of life, was needs-triage
22.04 LTS jammy Not in release
20.04 LTS focal Not in release
18.04 LTS bionic Ignored end of standard support
16.04 LTS xenial Ignored end of standard support
14.04 LTS trusty Ignored end of standard support

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 7.5 · High
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Scope Unchanged
Confidentiality High
Integrity impact None
Availability impact None
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

References

Other references