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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2023-51443 json

FreeSWITCH susceptible to Denial of Service via DTLS Hello packets during call initiation

published 2023-12-27 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2023-56161

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.5%
EPSS 1.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 74%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

FreeSWITCH is a Software Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation from proprietary telecom switches to a software implementation that runs on any commodity hardware. Prior to version 1.10.11, when handling DTLS-SRTP for media setup, FreeSWITCH is susceptible to Denial of Service due to a race condition in the hello handshake phase of the DTLS protocol. This attack can be done continuously, thus denying new DTLS-SRTP encrypted calls during the attack. If an attacker manages to send a ClientHello DTLS message with an invalid CipherSuite (such as `TLS_NULL_WITH_NULL_NULL`) to the port on the FreeSWITCH server that is expecting packets from the caller, a DTLS error is generated. This results in the media session being torn down, which is followed by teardown at signaling (SIP) level too. Abuse of this vulnerability may lead to a massive Denial of Service on vulnerable FreeSWITCH servers for calls that rely on DTLS-SRTP. To address this vulnerability, upgrade FreeSWITCH to 1.10.11 which includes the security fix. The solution implemented is to drop all packets from addresses that have not been validated by an ICE check.

Patch / fix

  • freeswitch freeswitch 1.10.11
  • freeswitch Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +5 more 1.10.11-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2023-51443

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

1.49% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 74% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/signalwire/freeswitch/security/advisories/GHSA-39gv-hq72-j6m6 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • packetstormsecurity.com http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/176393/FreeSWITCH-Denial-Of-Service.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 5.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • signalwire freeswitch

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-703 Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.