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OpenSSL 3 patch, once Heartbleed-level “critical,” arrives as a lesser “high”
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 1 November, 2022 - 18:05 · 1 minute
An OpenSSL vulnerability once signaled as the first critical-level patch since the Internet-reshaping Heartbleed bug has just been patched . It ultimately arrived as a "high" security fix for a buffer overflow, one that affects all OpenSSL 3.x installations, but is unlikely to lead to remote code execution.
OpenSSL version 3.0.7 was announced last week as a critical security fix release. The specific vulnerabilities (now CVE-2022-37786 and CVE-2022-3602 ) had been largely unknown until today, but analysts and businesses in the web security field hinted there could be notable problems and maintenance pain. Some Linux distributions, including Fedora , held up releases until the patch was available. Distribution giant Akamai noted before the patch that half of their monitored networks had at least one machine with a vulnerable OpenSSL 3.x instance, and among those networks, between 0.2 and 33 percent of machines were vulnerable.
But the specific vulnerabilities—limited-circumstance, client-side overflows that are mitigated by the stack layout on most modern platforms—are now patched, and rated as "High." And with OpenSSL 1.1.1 still in its long-term support phase, OpenSSL 3.x is not nearly as widespread.