ChaCha20-Poly1305 is an AEAD cipher, and requires a unique nonce input for every encryption operation.
CVE-2019-1543
ChaCha20-Poly1305 is an AEAD cipher, and requires a unique nonce input for every encryption operation. RFC 7539 specifies that the nonce value (IV) should be 96 bits (12 bytes). OpenSSL allows a variable nonce length and front pads the nonce with 0 bytes if it is less than 12 bytes. However it also incorrectly allows a nonce to be set of up to 16 bytes. In this case only the last 12 bytes are significant and any additional leading bytes are ignored. It is a requirement of using this cipher that nonce values are unique. Messages encrypted using a reused nonce value are susceptible to serious confidentiality and integrity attacks. If an application changes the default nonce length to be longer than 12 bytes and then makes a change to the leading bytes of the nonce expecting the new value to be a new unique nonce then such an application could inadvertently encrypt messages with a reused nonce. Additionally the ignored bytes in a long nonce are not covered by the integrity guarantee of this cipher. Any application that relies on the integrity of these ignored leading bytes of a long nonce may be further affected. Any OpenSSL internal use of this cipher, including in SSL/TLS, is safe…
Assessment
- CVSS
- Not yet scored
- Severity
- Unscored
- EPSS
- 5.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Known exploited
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Exploit availability
- Nothing found in Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or public PoC repositories
- Published
- 6 March 2019
- Last updated
- 2 November 2026
- Assigner
- openssl
At the source
References
- https://git.openssl.org/gitweb/?p=openssl.git%3Ba=commitdiff%3Bh=f426625b6ae9a7831010750490a5f0ad689c5ba3
- https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20190306.txt
- https://git.openssl.org/gitweb/?p=openssl.git%3Ba=commitdiff%3Bh=ee22257b1418438ebaf54df98af4e24f494d1809
- https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Jul/3
- https://www.debian.org/security/2019/dsa-4475
- https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpujul2019-5072835.html
- http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-07/msg00056.html
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/ZBEV5QGDRFUZDMNECFXUSN5FMYOZDE4V/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/Y3IVFGSERAZLNJCK35TEM2R4726XIH3Z/
- https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpuoct2019-5072832.html
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:3700
- https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2020.html
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