CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-25565 — GSS-NTLMSSP is a mechglue plugin for the GSSAPI library that implements NTLM authentication

High CVSS 7.5

GSS-NTLMSSP is a mechglue plugin for the GSSAPI library that implements NTLM authentication. Prior to version 1.2.0, an incorrect free when decoding target information can trigger a denial of service. The error condition incorrectly assumes the `cb` and `sh` buffers contain a copy of the data that needs to be freed. However, that is not the case. This vulnerability can be triggered via the main `gss_accept_sec_context` entry point. This will likely trigger an assertion failure in `free`, causing a denial-of-service. This issue is fixed in version 1.2.0.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-02-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-590, CWE-763

Affected products

  • gss-ntlmssp_project / gss-ntlmssp

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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