CVE-2018-16869

Publication date 3 December 2018

Last updated 25 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Low

Why this priority?

Cvss 3 Severity Score

5.7 · Medium

Score breakdown

Description

A Bleichenbacher type side-channel based padding oracle attack was found in the way nettle handles endian conversion of RSA decrypted PKCS#1 v1.5 data. An attacker who is able to run a process on the same physical core as the victim process, could use this flaw extract plaintext or in some cases downgrade any TLS connections to a vulnerable server.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
nettle 22.10 kinetic
Not affected
22.04 LTS jammy
Not affected
21.10 impish
Not affected
21.04 hirsute
Not affected
20.10 groovy
Not affected
20.04 LTS focal
Not affected
19.10 eoan
Not affected
19.04 disco
Not affected
18.10 cosmic Ignored end of life
18.04 LTS bionic
Fixed 3.4.1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1
16.04 LTS xenial Ignored change too intrusive
14.04 LTS trusty Ignored change too intrusive

Notes

mdeslaur

nettle changes are too intrusive to backport to stable releases

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 5.7 · Medium
Attack vector Physical
Attack complexity High
Privileges required None
User interaction None
Scope Changed
Confidentiality High
Integrity impact Low
Availability impact None
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

Other references