CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-8911 — A padding oracle vulnerability exists in the AWS S3 Crypto SDK for GoLang versions prior to V2

Medium CVSS 5.6

A padding oracle vulnerability exists in the AWS S3 Crypto SDK for GoLang versions prior to V2. The SDK allows users to encrypt files with AES-CBC without computing a Message Authentication Code (MAC), which then allows an attacker who has write access to the target's S3 bucket and can observe whether or not an endpoint with access to the key can decrypt a file, they can reconstruct the plaintext with (on average) 128*length (plaintext) queries to the endpoint, by exploiting CBC's ability to manipulate the bytes of the next block and PKCS5 padding errors. It is recommended to update your SDK to V2 or later, and re-encrypt your files.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.6 (3.1)
Published
2020-08-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-327

Affected products

  • amazon / aws_s3_crypto_sdk

Matched remediation archetype

Cryptography, certificate, signature, and channel validation

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

Check exposure

  • Inventory affected algorithms, key uses, trust stores, certificate validation settings, random sources, and plaintext channels across clients and services.
  • Determine which secrets, identities, signatures, or data protections depend on the affected primitive or validation path.
  • Check debug, compatibility, fallback, and hostname or audience override settings in build and runtime configuration.

Remediate safely

  • Use a maintained platform cryptographic API with approved algorithms, modes, parameters, randomness, and full peer identity validation.
  • Remove insecure fallback and validation bypasses; separate keys by purpose and load them from managed secret storage.
  • Plan rotation or reissuance for affected keys, certificates, tokens, hashes, or ciphertext and document compatibility sequencing.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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