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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.7

CVE-2018-16869 json

A Bleichenbacher type side-channel based padding oracle attack was found in the way nettle handles endian conversion of RSA decrypted PKCS#…

published 2018-12-03 7 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2018-8660

cvss
4.7
version 3.0, 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

A Bleichenbacher type side-channel based padding oracle attack was found in the way nettle handles endian conversion of RSA decrypted PKCS#1 v1.5 data. An attacker who is able to run a process on the same physical core as the victim process, could use this flaw extract plaintext or in some cases downgrade any TLS connections to a vulnerable server.

Patch / fix

  • nettle Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 3.4.1~rc1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2018-16869

  • nettle Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 3.4.1-0ubuntu0.18.04.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2018-16869

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • libnettle SLE Module for Desktop Applications 15, SLE Module for Basesystem 15 3.4-4.3.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:4193-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2018-16869 updated cvss 4.7

nettle: Leaky data conversion exposing a manager oracle

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 nettle Red Hat Virtualization 4 rhvm-appliance, redhat-virtualization-host-image-update
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 nettle, mingw-nettle, mingw32-nettle, mingw64-nettle
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

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

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 4.7 CVSS:3.0/AV:P/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD 3.1 5.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N
NVD 2.0 3.3 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:N

Affected products

  • [UNKNOWN] nettle

Classification

Weakness

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.