CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2019-17185 — In FreeRADIUS 3.0.x before 3.0.20, the EAP-pwd module used a global OpenSSL BN_CTX instance to handle all handshakes

High CVSS 7.5

In FreeRADIUS 3.0.x before 3.0.20, the EAP-pwd module used a global OpenSSL BN_CTX instance to handle all handshakes. This mean multiple threads use the same BN_CTX instance concurrently, resulting in crashes when concurrent EAP-pwd handshakes are initiated. This can be abused by an adversary as a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-03-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-662

Affected products

  • freeradius / freeradius
  • opensuse / leap / 15.1

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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