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NVFLARE unsafe deserialization due to Pickle

Critical severity GitHub Reviewed Published Aug 22, 2022 in NVIDIA/NVFlare • Updated Sep 2, 2023

Package

pip nvflare (pip)

Affected versions

< 2.1.4

Patched versions

2.1.4

Description

Impact

NVFLARE contains a vulnerability where deserialization of Untrusted Data due to Pickle usage may allow an unprivileged network attacker to cause Remote Code Execution, Denial Of Service, and Impact to both Confidentiality and Integrity.

All versions before 2.1.4 are affected.

CVSS Score = 9.8

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

Patches

The patch is included in nvflare==2.1.4
This new version uses MessagePack instead of Pickle to do serialization and deserialization.

Some object serializations supported by Pickle are not supported by MessagePack. We have provided out of box support for some built-in NVFLARE objects. For object serializations unsupported by MessagePack, the user will need to convert the objects to numpy or bytes before sending over to remote machines. The list of supported object types are listed in https://github.com/NVIDIA/NVFlare/blob/2.1/nvflare/fuel/utils/fobs/README.rst

Workarounds

No workarounds available.

Additional information

Issue Found by: Oliver Sellwood (Nintorac) and Elias Hohl

References

@chesterxgchen chesterxgchen published to NVIDIA/NVFlare Aug 22, 2022
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Aug 29, 2022
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Aug 31, 2022
Reviewed Aug 31, 2022
Last updated Sep 2, 2023

Severity

Critical

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS score

0.311%
(70th percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2022-34668

GHSA ID

GHSA-6qv6-q77g-7qm6

Source code

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