Cloudflare is not affected by the OpenSSL vulnerabilities CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786


Yesterday, November 1, 2022, OpenSSL released version 3.0.7 to patch CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786, two HIGH risk vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL 3.0.x cryptographic library. Cloudflare is not affected by these vulnerabilities because we use BoringSSL in our products.
These vulnerabilities are memory corruption issues, in which attackers may be able to execute arbitrary code on a victim’s machine. CVE-2022-3602 was initially announced as a CRITICAL severity vulnerability, but it was downgraded to HIGH because it was deemed difficult to exploit with remote code execution (RCE). Unlike previous situations where users of OpenSSL were almost universally vulnerable, software that is using other versions of OpenSSL (like 1.1.1) are not vulnerable to this attack.
How do these issues affect clients and servers?
These vulnerabilities reside in the code responsible for X.509 certificate verification - most often executed on the client side to authenticate the server and the certificate presented. In order to be impacted by this vulnerability the victim (client or server) needs a few conditions to be true:
- A malicious certificate needs to be signed by a Certificate Authority that the victim trusts.
- The victim needs to validate the malicious certificate or ignore a Continue reading