Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
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AccessControl malicious OCSP responder or on-path position
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DeliveryClient POSTs OCSP request to AIA URI
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ExploitResponder returns single HTTP redirect to internal URL
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ExecutionBotan follows redirect as bodyless GET
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ImpactBlind request hits internal service with timing oracle
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A01:2025 - Broken Access Control
ASVS 5.0
V4 - API and Web Service URL allowlisting, SSRF prevention
MITRE ATT&CK
2 techniques across 2 tactics: Initial Access, Credential Access The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Exploitation Conditions | The target application must actually use Botan's online OCSP client for certificate revocation checking (online OCSP enabled) on a vulnerable version (<= 3.12.0). The attacker must either operate the OCSP responder referenced in a validated certificate's Authority Information Access extension, or be an on-path attacker able to modify the HTTP response to inject a redirect. Several factors strictly LIMIT impact: only a SINGLE redirect is followed; the redirected request is a bodyless GET; no cookies or authorization credentials are forwarded; the response is never returned to the attacker (blind); and meaningful impact requires the reachable internal service to expose a non-idempotent GET handler or to leak state via connection/response timing. The issue does not apply once upgraded to 3.13.0, where redirects are disabled by default. |
| Impact | This is a medium-severity, defense-in-depth issue rather than an urgent priority. The supplied CVSS 3.1 vector (CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:L, base 6.1) models an unauthenticated, low-complexity attack with a scope change (the affected internal service differs from the vulnerable Botan component) and only partial integrity/availability impact and no confidentiality impact - consistent with a BLIND SSRF where the attacker never sees the response. The vuln.today decision label is 'this_month', not act_now/emergency, which matches the signal picture: there is no CISA KEV listing (not actively exploited) and no public exploit code - the three references are the GHSA advisory, the fixing PR, and the fix commit, not PoC/exploit code. No EPSS score was provided in the input, so exploitation-probability cannot be weighed here. The signals are internally consistent (medium CVSS, no KEV, no PoC, this_month) with one caveat worth verifying: the input vector asserts AV:A (adjacent), but the advisory's own threat model - 'a malicious OCSP responder' referenced by a certificate's AIA extension - describes a network-reachable adversary, so a network vector (AV:N) is arguably more accurate; verify the intended vector with the vendor. The real-world impact is further blunted by the blind, single-request, no-credential-forwarding nature of the flaw, so this is a genuine but low-urgency SSRF rather than a high-CVSS/low-real-risk false alarm. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | A victim application uses Botan's online OCSP client to validate certificates; an attacker who controls the OCSP responder named in a certificate's Authority Information Access extension (or is on-path and can modify the HTTP response) returns a single HTTP redirect pointing at an internal URL such as http://127.0.0.1/private-control?operation=export. Botan follows that one redirect as a bodyless GET, issuing a blind request to the otherwise-unreachable internal service; the attacker cannot read the response but can target non-idempotent GET handlers and use connection/response timing as a coarse internal-service oracle. No public exploit identified at time of analysis; the references are the advisory, fix PR, and commit only. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Oct 29, 2026
Botan's online OCSP client in versions up to and including 3.12.0 follows a single HTTP redirect issued in response to the revocation-status POST, letting a malicious OCSP responder or an on-path attacker who can modify the HTTP response push the client into a blind request against an otherwise unreachable internal HTTP service. The request carries no cookies or credentials, the response is never returned to the attacker, and in 3.12.0 a redirect-handling bug reduced the redirected POST to a bodyless GET, so practical impact is limited to blind SSRF against internal endpoints with non-idempotent GET handlers plus a coarse internal-service oracle derived from connection and response timing. The flaw is fixed in Botan 3.13.0, which disables redirects by default; no public exploit code was identified at time of analysis, and this is assessed as a medium-severity defense-in-depth issue rather than an urgent priority.
RemediationAI
Upgrade to Botan 3.13.0, the vendor-released patch for this issue; the fix (upstream PR #5815, commit 9791ca39a556c76186b1fc943c7d8d460712d58f) sets the default HTTP redirect budget to zero so OCSP exchanges no longer follow redirects, and a regression test confirms that a redirect response now raises an HTTP error while contacting only the configured responder origin. Consult the GitHub security advisory GHSA-9qgq-q9j4-4f82 for the authoritative version matrix. Note that exposure exists only where the application enables Botan's online OCSP client, so deployments that rely on OCSP stapling, cached responses or CRL-based validation do not exercise the vulnerable path; disabling online OCSP checking is therefore a viable interim reduction of attack surface for builds that cannot be upgraded immediately, though it changes revocation-checking behaviour and may leave status validation to the peer or to out-of-band mechanisms.
Affected VersionsENISA
Affected Packages
Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)
Affects your stack
Affects 1 package in euvd
Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) revocation checking lets a TLS peer POST a DER-encoded status request to the URI advertised in a certificate's Authority Information Access extension. Botan implements this with a small internal HTTP client (RequestLimits in src/lib/utils/http_util/http_util.h) that was configured with m_max_redirects = 1, so a single 3xx response was honoured by the OCSP exchange routine. Because the redirect target is attacker-influenced rather than validated against the original responder origin, this is a classic server-side request forgery pattern (CWE-918): the client can be steered to loopback, link-local or RFC1918 addresses that the attacker cannot reach directly. The GHSA notes several constraints that bound the impact: credentials and cookies are not forwarded across the redirect, the internal service's response body is not exposed to the attacker, only one hop is permitted, and in 3.12.0 the redirect path also turned the POST into a bodyless GET. The upstream fix (PR #5815, commit 9791ca3) changes the default redirect budget to 0 and adds a regression test asserting that a 303 response to an OCSP-style POST raises an HTTP error after contacting only the configured origin. Exploitation requires that the application actually enable Botan's online OCSP client and that the attacker either control the responder named in the certificate AIA field or sit on-path able to rewrite the plaintext HTTP response; the trigger only arises during revocation checking, not from ordinary cryptographic operations.
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Severity by source
AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:L
A malicious OCSP responder is network-reachable (AV:N, diverging from the input's AV:A); no auth or user interaction (PR:N/UI:N); blind so C:N, with limited integrity/availability via the single internal GET (I:L/A:L, S:C for the separate internal system).
Primary rating from Vendor (GitHub_M).
CVSS VectorVendor: GitHub_M
Lifecycle Timeline
1DescriptionCVE.org
Botan is a C++ cryptography library. Prior to 3.13.0, Botan's online OCSP client allowed a single HTTP redirect while posting an OCSP request to the URI in a certificate's Authority Information Access extension. A malicious OCSP responder or an on-path attacker could redirect the client to make one blind request to an otherwise unreachable internal HTTP service. The primary impact is blind SSRF that might affect internal services with non-idempotent GET handlers, and response timing can provide a coarse internal-service oracle. This issue is fixed in version 3.13.0.
Threat Intelligence Overview
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Server-Side Request Forgery exploits applications that fetch remote resources based on user-supplied URLs.
Integer overflow in the PointGFp constructor in Botan before 1.10.11 and 1.11.x before 1.11.27 allows remote attackers t
Heap-based buffer overflow in the P-521 reduction function in Botan 1.11.x before 1.11.27 allows remote attackers to cau
A programming error exists in a way Randombit Botan cryptographic library version 2.0.1 implements x500 string compariso
Botan before 3.6.0, when certain GCC versions are used, has a compiler-induced secret-dependent operation in lib/utils/d
Botan before 3.6.0, when certain LLVM versions are used, has compiler-induced secret-dependent control flow in lib/utils
The ElGamal implementation in Botan through 2.18.1, as used in Thunderbird and other products, allows plaintext recovery
Botan 2.5.0 through 2.6.0 before 2.7.0 allows a memory-cache side-channel attack on ECDSA signatures, aka the Return Of
botan 1.11.x before 1.11.22 improperly handles wildcard matching against hostnames, which might allow remote attackers t
The Curve25519 code in botan before 1.11.31, on systems without a native 128-bit integer type, might allow attackers to
In Botan 1.8.0 through 1.11.33, when decoding BER data an integer overflow could occur, which would cause an incorrect l
In Botan before 2.17.3, constant-time computations are not used for certain decoding and encoding operations (base32, ba
Botan 2.2.0 - 2.4.0 (fixed in 2.5.0) improperly handled wildcard certificates and could accept certain certificates as v
EUVD-2026-113275
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
GitHub
Exploit-DB