Findings

CVE-2023-4807

POLY1305 MAC implementation corrupts XMM registers on Windows

Published Sep 8, 2023 · updated Oct 14, 2026 · OpenSSL OpenSSL

Issue summary: The POLY1305 MAC (message authentication code) implementation contains a bug that might corrupt the internal state of applications on the Windows 64 platform when running on newer X86_64 processors supporting the AVX512-IFMA instructions. Impact summary: If in an application that uses the OpenSSL library an attacker can influence whether the POLY1305 MAC algorithm is used, the application state might be corrupted with various application dependent consequences. The POLY1305 MAC (message authentication code) implementation in OpenSSL does not save the contents of non-volatile XMM registers on Windows 64 platform when calculating the MAC of data larger than 64 bytes. Before returning to the caller all the XMM registers are set to zero rather than restoring their previous content. The vulnerable code is used only on newer x86_64 processors supporting the AVX512-IFMA instructions. The consequences of this kind of internal application state corruption can be various - from no consequences, if the calling application does not depend on the contents of non-volatile XMM registers at all, to the worst consequences, where the attacker could get complete control of the application process. However given the contents of the registers are just zeroized so the attacker cannot put arbitrary values inside, the most likely consequence, if any, would be an incorrect result of some application dependent calculations or a crash leading to a denial of service. The POLY1305 MAC algorithm is most frequently used as part of the CHACHA20-POLY1305 AEAD (authenticated encryption with associated data) algorithm. The most common usage of this AEAD cipher is with TLS protocol versions 1.2 and 1.3 and a malicious client can influence whether this AEAD cipher is used by the server. This implies that server applications using OpenSSL can be potentially impacted. However we are currently not aware of any concrete application that would be affected by this issue therefore we consider t