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Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by errors in OpenSSL resulting in denial-of-service attacks and incorrect X.509 certificate verification due to multiple vulnerabilities.

Security Bulletin


Summary

IBM i is affected by errors in OpenSSL as part of IBM Portable Utilities for i resulting in denial-of-service attacks [CVE-2023-0464, CVE-2023-2650, CVE-2023-3817] and incorrect X.509 certificate verification [CVE-2023-0465, CVE-2023-0466] as described in the vulnerability details section. This bulletin identifies the steps to take to address the vulnerabilities as described in the remediation/fixes section.

Vulnerability Details

CVEID:   CVE-2023-0464
DESCRIPTION:   A security vulnerability has been identified in all supported versions of OpenSSL related to the verification of X.509 certificate chains that include policy constraints. Attackers may be able to exploit this vulnerability by creating a malicious certificate chain that triggers exponential use of computational resources, leading to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on affected systems. Policy processing is disabled by default but can be enabled by passing the `-policy' argument to the command line utilities or by calling the `X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()' function.
CWE:   CWE-295: Improper Certificate Validation
CVSS Source:   IBM X-Force
CVSS Base score:   5.3
CVSS Vector:   (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L)

CVEID:   CVE-2023-0465
DESCRIPTION:   Applications that use a non-default option when verifying certificates may be vulnerable to an attack from a malicious CA to circumvent certain checks. Invalid certificate policies in leaf certificates are silently ignored by OpenSSL and other certificate policy checks are skipped for that certificate. A malicious CA could use this to deliberately assert invalid certificate policies in order to circumvent policy checking on the certificate altogether. Policy processing is disabled by default but can be enabled by passing the `-policy' argument to the command line utilities or by calling the `X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies()' function.
CWE:   CWE-295: Improper Certificate Validation
CVSS Source:   IBM X-Force
CVSS Base score:   3.7
CVSS Vector:   (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N)

CVEID:   CVE-2023-0466
DESCRIPTION:   The function X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() is documented to implicitly enable the certificate policy check when doing certificate verification. However the implementation of the function does not enable the check which allows certificates with invalid or incorrect policies to pass the certificate verification. As suddenly enabling the policy check could break existing deployments it was decided to keep the existing behavior of the X509_VERIFY_PARAM_add0_policy() function. Instead the applications that require OpenSSL to perform certificate policy check need to use X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_policies() or explicitly enable the policy check by calling X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set_flags() with the X509_V_FLAG_POLICY_CHECK flag argument. Certificate policy checks are disabled by default in OpenSSL and are not commonly used by applications.
CWE:   CWE-295: Improper Certificate Validation
CVSS Source:   IBM X-Force
CVSS Base score:   3.7
CVSS Vector:   (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N)

CVEID:   CVE-2023-2650
DESCRIPTION:   Issue summary: Processing some specially crafted ASN.1 object identifiers or data containing them may be very slow. Impact summary: Applications that use OBJ_obj2txt() directly, or use any of the OpenSSL subsystems OCSP, PKCS7/SMIME, CMS, CMP/CRMF or TS with no message size limit may experience notable to very long delays when processing those messages, which may lead to a Denial of Service. An OBJECT IDENTIFIER is composed of a series of numbers - sub-identifiers - most of which have no size limit. OBJ_obj2txt() may be used to translate an ASN.1 OBJECT IDENTIFIER given in DER encoding form (using the OpenSSL type ASN1_OBJECT) to its canonical numeric text form, which are the sub-identifiers of the OBJECT IDENTIFIER in decimal form, separated by periods. When one of the sub-identifiers in the OBJECT IDENTIFIER is very large (these are sizes that are seen as absurdly large, taking up tens or hundreds of KiBs), the translation to a decimal number in text may take a very long time. The time complexity is O(n^2) with 'n' being the size of the sub-identifiers in bytes (*). With OpenSSL 3.0, support to fetch cryptographic algorithms using names / identifiers in string form was introduced. This includes using OBJECT IDENTIFIERs in canonical numeric text form as identifiers for fetching algorithms. Such OBJECT IDENTIFIERs may be received through the ASN.1 structure AlgorithmIdentifier, which is commonly used in multiple protocols to specify what cryptographic algorithm should be used to sign or verify, encrypt or decrypt, or digest passed data. Applications that call OBJ_obj2txt() directly with untrusted data are affected, with any version of OpenSSL. If the use is for the mere purpose of display, the severity is considered low. In OpenSSL 3.0 and newer, this affects the subsystems OCSP, PKCS7/SMIME, CMS, CMP/CRMF or TS. It also impacts anything that processes X.509 certificates, including simple things like verifying its signature. The impact on TLS is relatively low, because all versions of OpenSSL have a 100KiB limit on the peer's certificate chain. Additionally, this only impacts clients, or servers that have explicitly enabled client authentication. In OpenSSL 1.1.1 and 1.0.2, this only affects displaying diverse objects, such as X.509 certificates. This is assumed to not happen in such a way that it would cause a Denial of Service, so these versions are considered not affected by this issue in such a way that it would be cause for concern, and the severity is therefore considered low.
CWE:   CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
CVSS Source:   IBM X-Force
CVSS Base score:   6.5
CVSS Vector:   (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H)

CVEID:   CVE-2023-3817
DESCRIPTION:   Issue summary: Checking excessively long DH keys or parameters may be very slow. Impact summary: Applications that use the functions DH_check(), DH_check_ex() or EVP_PKEY_param_check() to check a DH key or DH parameters may experience long delays. Where the key or parameters that are being checked have been obtained from an untrusted source this may lead to a Denial of Service. The function DH_check() performs various checks on DH parameters. After fixing CVE-2023-3446 it was discovered that a large q parameter value can also trigger an overly long computation during some of these checks. A correct q value, if present, cannot be larger than the modulus p parameter, thus it is unnecessary to perform these checks if q is larger than p. An application that calls DH_check() and supplies a key or parameters obtained from an untrusted source could be vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack. The function DH_check() is itself called by a number of other OpenSSL functions. An application calling any of those other functions may similarly be affected. The other functions affected by this are DH_check_ex() and EVP_PKEY_param_check(). Also vulnerable are the OpenSSL dhparam and pkeyparam command line applications when using the "-check" option. The OpenSSL SSL/TLS implementation is not affected by this issue. The OpenSSL 3.0 and 3.1 FIPS providers are not affected by this issue.
CWE:   CWE-606: Unchecked Input for Loop Condition
CVSS Source:   IBM X-Force
CVSS Base score:   3.7
CVSS Vector:   (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L)

Affected Products and Versions

Affected Product(s)Version(s)
IBM i7.6
IBM i7.5
IBM i7.4
IBM i7.3
IBM i7.2

Remediation/Fixes

The issues can be fixed by applying PTFs to IBM i.  IBM i 7.6, 7.5, 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 are addressed.
The IBM i PTF numbers for 5733-SC1 contain the fixes for the vulnerabilities.  5733-SC1 for IBM i 7.2 is a skip ship product installable on IBM i 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4. 

 

https://www.ibm.com/support/fixcentral

Important note: IBM recommends that all users running unsupported versions of affected products upgrade to supported and fixed version of affected products.

 

Workarounds and Mitigations

None.

Get Notified about Future Security Bulletins

References

Off

Acknowledgement

Change History

12 Aug 2025: Initial Publication

*The CVSS Environment Score is customer environment specific and will ultimately impact the Overall CVSS Score. Customers can evaluate the impact of this vulnerability in their environments by accessing the links in the Reference section of this Security Bulletin.

Disclaimer

According to the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is an "industry open standard designed to convey vulnerability severity and help to determine urgency and priority of response." IBM PROVIDES THE CVSS SCORES ""AS IS"" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. CUSTOMERS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF ANY ACTUAL OR POTENTIAL SECURITY VULNERABILITY. In addition to other efforts to address potential vulnerabilities, IBM periodically updates the record of components contained in our product offerings. As part of that effort, if IBM identifies previously unidentified packages in a product/service inventory, we address relevant vulnerabilities regardless of CVE date. Inclusion of an older CVEID does not demonstrate that the referenced product has been used by IBM since that date, nor that IBM was aware of a vulnerability as of that date. We are making clients aware of relevant vulnerabilities as we become aware of them. "Affected Products and Versions" referenced in IBM Security Bulletins are intended to be only products and versions that are supported by IBM and have not passed their end-of-support or warranty date. Thus, failure to reference unsupported or extended-support products and versions in this Security Bulletin does not constitute a determination by IBM that they are unaffected by the vulnerability. Reference to one or more unsupported versions in this Security Bulletin shall not create an obligation for IBM to provide fixes for any unsupported or extended-support products or versions.

Document Location

Worldwide

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Document Information

Modified date:
12 August 2025

Initial Publish date:
12 August 2025

UID

ibm17242043