Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-40661

Medium

Published: 06 November 2023

Published
06 November 2023
Modified
03 November 2025
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 5.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0029 53.2th percentile
Risk Priority 11 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2023-40661 is a medium-severity Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer (CWE-119) vulnerability in Redhat Enterprise Linux. Its CVSS base score is 5.4 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked in the top 46.8% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

Several memory vulnerabilities were identified within the OpenSC packages, particularly in the card enrollment process using pkcs15-init when a user or administrator enrolls cards. To take advantage of these flaws, an attacker must have physical access to the computer system…

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and employ a custom-crafted USB device or smart card to manipulate responses to APDUs. This manipulation can potentially allow compromise key generation, certificate loading, and other card management operations during enrollment.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

opensc project
opensc
≤ 0.23.0
redhat
enterprise linux
8.0, 9.0

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-119

Ongoing control assessments and code testing (static/dynamic analysis, fuzzing) surface memory buffer restriction failures, which are then remediated before release.

addresses: CWE-119

Managed runtimes used by platform-independent applications (e.g., JVM, CLR) enforce memory safety, preventing most buffer overflows that require direct memory manipulation.

addresses: CWE-119

Memory protections (e.g., W^X, ASLR) make exploitation of buffer-boundary violations far harder to turn into code execution.

addresses: CWE-119

Detects exploitation attempts that produce memory corruption, crashes, or anomalous behavior.

References