CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-46849 — Openvpn Openvpn security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

Using the --fragment option in certain configuration setups OpenVPN version 2.6.0 to 2.6.6 allows an attacker to trigger a divide by zero behaviour which could cause an application crash, leading to a denial of service.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-11-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-369

Affected products

  • openvpn / openvpn
  • openvpn / openvpn_access_server
  • openvpn / openvpn_access_server / 2.12.0
  • openvpn / openvpn_access_server / 2.12.1
  • debian / debian_linux / 12.0
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 39

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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