Reported

May 2, 2024

Issued

May 20, 2024

Package

vodozemac (crates.io)

Type

Vulnerability

Categories

• memory-exposure

Aliases

• CVE-2024-34063
• GHSA-c3hm-hxwf-g5c6

References

• https://github.com/matrix-org/vodozemac/security/advisories/GHSA-c3hm-hxwf-g5c6

Patched

• >=0.6.0

Unaffected

• <0.5.0

Description

Versions 0.5.0 and 0.5.1 of vodozemac have degraded secret zeroization capabilities, due to changes in third-party cryptographic dependencies (the Dalek crates), which moved secret zeroization capabilities behind a feature flag while vodozemac disabled the default feature set.

Impact

The degraded zeroization capabilities could result in the production of more memory copies of encryption secrets and secrets could linger in memory longer than necessary. This marginally increases the risk of sensitive data exposure.

Overall, we consider the impact of this issue to be low. Although cryptographic best practices recommend the clearing of sensitive information from memory once it's no longer needed, the inherent limitations of Rust regarding absolute zeroization reduce the practical severity of this lapse.

Advisory available under CC0-1.0 license.