CVE-2023-48224 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.2) CWE-338 vulnerability in ethyca-fides. A fix is available for ethyca-fides — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Cryptographically Weak Generation of One-Time Codes for Identity Verification in ethyca-fides
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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-2023-48224.
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
ethyca-fidesReal-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
Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform for managing the fulfillment of data privacy requests in a runtime environment, and the enforcement of privacy regulations in code. The Fides Privacy Center allows data subject users to submit privacy and consent requests to data controller users of the Fides web application. Privacy requests allow data subjects to submit a request to access all person data held by the data controller, or delete/erase it. Consent request allows data subject users to modify their privacy preferences for how the data controller uses their personal data e.g. data sales and sharing consent opt-in/opt-out. If subject_identity_verification_required in the [execution] section of fides.toml or the env var FIDES__EXECUTION__SUBJECT_IDENTITY_VERIFICATION_REQUIRED is set to True on the fides webserver backend, data subjects are sent a one-time code to their email address or phone number, depending on messaging configuration, and the one-time code must be entered in the Privacy Center UI by the data subject before the privacy or consent request is submitted. It was identified that the one-time code values for these requests were generated by the python random module, a cryptographically weak pseduo-random number generator (PNRG). If an attacker generates several hundred consecutive one-time codes, this vulnerability allows the attacker to predict all future one-time code values during the lifetime of the backend python process. There is no security impact on data access requests as the personal data download package is not shared in the Privacy Center itself. However, this vulnerability allows an attacker to (i) submit a verified data erasure request, resulting in deletion of data for the targeted user and (ii) submit a verified consent request, modifying a user's privacy preferences. The vulnerability has been patched in Fides version 2.24.0. Users are advised to upgrade to this version or later to secure their systems against this threat. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | ethyca-fides | all versions | 2.24.0pip install --upgrade 'ethyca-fides==2.24.0' |
Affected Products
fidesethycaDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for ethyca-fides, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update ethyca-fides to 2.24.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-48224 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-48224 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.