GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6 — ring
Fix: briansmith/ring#2447GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6 is a CWE-770 vulnerability in ring. A fix is available for ring — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Some AES functions may panic when overflow checking is enabled in ring
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 GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
Real-World Exposure
ringReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
ring::aead::quic::HeaderProtectionKey::new_mask() may panic when overflow checking is enabled. In the QUIC protocol, an attacker can induce this panic by sending a specially-crafted packet. Even unintentionally it is likely to occur in 1 out of every 2**32 packets sent and/or received.
On 64-bit targets operations using ring::aead::{AES_128_GCM, AES_256_GCM} may panic when overflow checking is enabled, when encrypting/decrypting approximately 68,719,476,700 bytes (about 64 gigabytes) of data in a single chunk. Protocols like TLS and SSH are not affected by this because those protocols break large amounts of data into small chunks. Similarly, most applications will not attempt to encrypt/decrypt 64GB of data in one chunk.
Overflow checking is not enabled in release mode by default, but RUSTFLAGS="-C overflow-checks" or overflow-checks = true in the Cargo.toml profile can override this. Overflow checking is usually enabled by default in debug mode.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | ring | all versions | 0.17.12cargo update -p ring --precise 0.17.12 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for ring, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update ring to 0.17.12 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6 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.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-4p46-pwfr-66x6 across crates.io dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.