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PocketMine-MP server crash due to incorrect EC curve used for LoginPacket identityPublicKey

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Sep 13, 2023 in pmmp/PocketMine-MP • Updated Sep 14, 2023

Package

composer pocketmine/pocketmine-mp (Composer)

Affected versions

>= 5.2.0, < 5.3.1

Patched versions

5.3.1

Description

Impact

The server uses ECDH to calculate a shared secret for the symmetric encryption key used to encrypt network packets after logging in. ECDH requires that the keys used must both belong to the same elliptic curve. In Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, the curve used is secp384r1.

Using any other curve (for example secp256r1) to sign the LoginPacket JWTs would lead to successfully verifying the login chain, but would later crash due to an uncaught exception during ECDH key derivation due to the client-provided key belonging to a different curve than the server's key. It's also theoretically possible that a non-EC key could be used (e.g. RSA or DH), which would also pass login verification as long as SHA384 hashing algorithm was used for the JWT signatures, and also lead to a crash.

Patches

The problem was fixed in 4.23.1 and 5.3.1 in the following commit: 4e646d19a4a1e0d082bd4d1f5a58ae0182a268d9
While 4.x would not have crashed when this was encountered, the faulty validation code has also been corrected there.

Workarounds

A plugin could handle LoginPacket and check that all of the identityPublicKeys provided in the JWT bodies actually belong to secp384r1. This can be checked by verifying that openssl_pkey_get_details($key)["ec"]["curve_name"] is set and equal to secp384r1. Beware that this element may not exist if the key is not an EC key at all.

References

@dktapps dktapps published to pmmp/PocketMine-MP Sep 13, 2023
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Sep 14, 2023
Reviewed Sep 14, 2023
Last updated Sep 14, 2023

Severity

High
7.5
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Weaknesses

No CWEs

CVE ID

No known CVE

GHSA ID

GHSA-79rc-jjh6-rc89

Source code

Credits

Checking history
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