CVE-2023-46129

unknown

Published 2023-10-31 · Modified 2026-02-04

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CVSS v3

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CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

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Description

NATS.io is a high performance open source pub-sub distributed communication technology, built for the cloud, on-premise, IoT, and edge computing. The cryptographic key handling library, nkeys, recently gained support for encryption, not just for signing/authentication. This is used in nats-server 2.10 (Sep 2023) and newer for authentication callouts. In nkeys versions 0.4.0 through 0.4.5, corresponding with NATS server versions 2.10.0 through 2.10.3, the nkeys library's `xkeys` encryption handling logic mistakenly passed an array by value into an internal function, where the function mutated that buffer to populate the encryption key to use. As a result, all encryption was actually to an all-zeros key. This affects encryption only, not signing. FIXME: FILL IN IMPACT ON NATS-SERVER AUTH CALLOUT SECURITY. nkeys Go library 0.4.6, corresponding with NATS Server 2.10.4, has a patch for this issue. No known workarounds are available. For any application handling auth callouts in Go, if using the nkeys library, update the dependency, recompile and deploy that in lockstep.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

30%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

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OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
debian	bookworm	fixed	`0`
debian	bullseye	fixed	`0`
debian	forky	fixed	`0.4.6-1`
debian	sid	fixed	`0.4.6-1`
debian	trixie	fixed	`0.4.6-1`

Package impact

Ecosystem	Package	Vulnerable	Fixed
Go	github.com/nats-io/nkeys	`>=0.4.0,<0.4.6`	`0.4.6`
Go	github.com/nats-io/nats-server/v2	`>=2.10.0,<2.10.4`	`2.10.4`

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.