CVE-2025-22869 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-770 vulnerability in golang.org/x/crypto. A fix is available for golang.org/x/crypto — see the affected versions and patch details below.
golang.org/x/crypto Vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) via Slow or Incomplete Key Exchange
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-2025-22869.
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
golang.org/x/cryptoReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
SSH servers which implement file transfer protocols are vulnerable to a denial of service attack from clients which complete the key exchange slowly, or not at all, causing pending content to be read into memory, but never transmitted.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | golang.org/x/crypto | all versions | 0.35.0go get golang.org/x/crypto@v0.35.0 |
Affected Products
sshgoDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for golang.org/x/crypto, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update golang.org/x/crypto to 0.35.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-22869 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
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.
While this flaw affects both SSH clients and servers implemented with golang.org/x/crypto/ssh, realistically the flaw will only lead to a DoS when transferring large files, greatly reducing the likelihood of exploitation.
This flaw can be mitigated when using the client only connecting to trusted servers.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2025-22869 (CC BY 4.0)
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| gatekeeper 3.15 for RHEL 9 | gatekeeper/gatekeeper-operator-bundle:v3.15.4-1 | RHSA-2025:3053 |
| gatekeeper 3.17 for RHEL 9 | gatekeeper/gatekeeper-operator-bundle:v3.17.2-2 | RHSA-2025:3051 |
| gatekeeper 3.18 for RHEL 9 | gatekeeper/gatekeeper-operator-bundle:v3.18.0-1 | RHSA-2025:3052 |
| multicluster-globalhub 1.2 for RHEL 9 | multicluster-globalhub/multicluster-globalhub-agent-rhel9:v1.2.2-3 | RHSA-2025:3498 |
| multicluster-globalhub 1.3 for RHEL 9 | multicluster-globalhub/multicluster-globalhub-agent-rhel9:v1.3.3-5 | RHSA-2025:3863 |
| OADP-1.4-RHEL-9 | oadp/oadp-mustgather-rhel9:1.4.5-34 | RHSA-2025:11396 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.10 for RHEL 9 | rhacm2/acm-cluster-permission-rhel9:v2.10.8-8 | RHSA-2025:4502 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11 for RHEL 9 | rhacm2/endpoint-monitoring-rhel9-operator:v2.11.7-13 | RHSA-2025:4666 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-22869 in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.