Timing side channel in private key RSA operations.

Title	Timing side channel in private key RSA operations.
CVE	CVE-2024-23170
Date	10 January 2024
Affects	All versions of Mbed TLS up to and including 2.28.6 and 3.5.1
Impact	Potential recovery of plaintext
Severity	Medium
Credit	Hubert Kario (Red Hat)

Vulnerability

Mbed TLS is vulnerable to a timing side channel in private key RSA operations. This side channel could be sufficient for an attacker to recover the plaintext. A local attacker or a remote attacker who is close to the victim on the network might have precise enough timing measurements to exploit this. It requires the attacker to send a large number of messages for decryption. For details, see Everlasting ROBOT: the Marvin Attack, Hubert Kario (Red Hat).

Impact

An attacker meeting the conditions above could potentially recover the plaintext.

Resolution

Affected users will want to upgrade to Mbed TLS 3.5.2 or 2.28.7 depending on the branch they’re currently using.

Work-around

There is no known work-around. Affected users need to upgrade.