Bug 2500850

Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

Vulnerability Reference: A flaw was found in kronosnet where it fails to properly sanitize sensitive memory locations following cryptographic configuration adjustments, potentially exposing encryption keys to local attackers.

Component / Vulnerable Part: kronosnet -> Core cryptographic configuration and memory management subsystems (https://github.com/kronosnet/kronosnet/).

Technical Analysis & Root Cause: When cryptographic configuration changes are performed within kronosnet, the internal memory structures holding active encryption keys are freed or reallocated. However, the runtime implementation lacks an explicit memory-wiping routine (such as memset_s or equivalent secure clearing operations) before releasing these blocks back to the system heap. As a result, the raw cryptographic key material remains resident in unallocated memory space. A local attacker with the capability to exploit secondary memory disclosure vulnerabilities or inspect uninitialized heap segments can recover the active encryption key.

Impact: With the recovered cryptographic key, a local attacker can decrypt network communications handled by the kronosnet framework or inject unauthorized packets into the cluster traffic, leading to data exposure and cluster or system instability.