CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-29409 — Extremely large RSA keys in certificate chains can cause a client/server to expend significant CPU time verifying signatures

Medium CVSS 5.3

Extremely large RSA keys in certificate chains can cause a client/server to expend significant CPU time verifying signatures. With fix, the size of RSA keys transmitted during handshakes is restricted to <= 8192 bits. Based on a survey of publicly trusted RSA keys, there are currently only three certificates in circulation with keys larger than this, and all three appear to be test certificates that are not actively deployed. It is possible there are larger keys in use in private PKIs, but we target the web PKI, so causing breakage here in the interests of increasing the default safety of users of crypto/tls seems reasonable.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2023-08-02
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • golang / go
  • golang / go / 1.21.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 5 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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