CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-34703 — Botan is a C++ cryptography library

High CVSS 7.5

Botan is a C++ cryptography library. X.509 certificates can identify elliptic curves using either an object identifier or using explicit encoding of the parameters. Prior to versions 3.3.0 and 2.19.4, an attacker could present an ECDSA X.509 certificate using explicit encoding where the parameters are very large. The proof of concept used a 16Kbit prime for this purpose. When parsing, the parameter is checked to be prime, causing excessive computation. This was patched in 2.19.4 and 3.3.0 to allow the prime parameter of the elliptic curve to be at most 521 bits. No known workarounds are available. Note that support for explicit encoding of elliptic curve parameters is deprecated in Botan.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-06-30
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-405, CWE-770

Affected products

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Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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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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