vulnerable to Minerva side-channel information leak
CVE: CVE-2023-6135
Component: nss
CWE: CWE-200
Severity: Moderate
CVSS v3: 4.2/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Release date: 2023-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Network Security Services (NSS) package contains a vulnerability that exposes a side-channel information leak. This weakness enables a local attacker to capture several thousand usages of a signature, allowing them to utilize this information to recover portions of an ECDSA private key.

Statement: The severity of the Network Security Services (NSS) package vulnerability is marked as moderate due to the inherent risk associated with a potential side-channel information leak. This flaw empowers a local attacker to capture a substantial volume of signature usages, providing a pathway for them to exploit this data to reconstruct portions of an ECDSA private key. The ECDSA private key is a fundamental component of cryptographic security, and a successful compromise could have severe implications for the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information.

The side channel present in NSS is on the order of 20 to 50ns, measuring such small differences over the network, without ability to measure signature with the same nonce is not something anybody has shown as possible. The only reason we can measure such small differences in the Marvin attack (https://people.redhat.com/~hkario/marvin/) is because the attacker there has full control over the processed messages, as such can measure the same message over and over, with ECDSA NSS is generating the used nonce randomly, and internally, for each and every signature. So a possibility of a purely network attack is rather theoretical at this moment.

Remediation:
Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258
For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

After installing this update, applications using NSS (for example, Firefox) must be restarted for this update to take effect.
For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

After installing this update, applications using NSS (for example, Firefox) must be restarted for this update to take effect.
For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

After installing this update, applications using NSS (for example, Firefox) must be restarted for this update to take effect.
For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

After installing this update, applications using NSS (for example, Firefox) must be restarted for this update to take effect.
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options don't meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.