CVE-2022-3500 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.1) CWE-248 vulnerability in keylime. A fix is available for keylime — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Keylime: unhandled exceptions could lead to invalid attestation states
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-3500.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
keylimeReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Impact
This vulnerability creates a false sense of security for keylime users -- i.e. a user could query keylime and conclude that a parcitular node/agent is correctly attested, while attestations are not in fact taking place.
Short explanation: the keylime verifier creates periodic reports on the state of each attested agent. The keylime verifier runs a set of python asynchronous processes to challenge attested nodes and create reports on the outcome.
The vulnerability consists of the above named python asynchronous processes failing silently, i.e. quitting without leaving behind a database entry, raising an error or producing even a mention of an error in a log. The silent failure can be triggered by a small set of transient network failure conditions; recoverable device driver crashes being one such condition we saw in the wild.
Patches
The problem is fixed in keylime starting with tag 6.5.1
Workarounds
This patch can be retroactively applied to any running keylime deployment. Only running verifiers need to be patched. After the patch is applied, the keylime verifier needs to be restarted.
References
The problem, as well as the proposed fix, are described in detail here. Further details about the system where the bug was found, and the conditions in which the bug was found, are available from @galmasi on demand.
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please comment at the bottom of the advisory itself.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | keylime | all versions | 6.5.1pip install --upgrade 'keylime==6.5.1' |
Affected Products
fedorafedoraprojectkeylimekeylimeenterprise linuxredhatDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for keylime, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update keylime to 6.5.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-3500 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | keylime-0:6.5.1-1.el9_1 | RHSA-2022:8444 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-3500 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.