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CVE-2018-16869

21
FAUCET Score

CVE-2018-16869 describes a Bleichenbacher-type padding oracle side-channel vulnerability in the nettle cryptographic library, specifically affecting its handling of RSA decrypted PKCS#1 v1.5 data. An attacker co-located on the same physical core as a victim process could exploit this flaw to extract plaintext or downgrade TLS connections. While rated Medium severity (CVSS 5.7) due to its physical attack vector and high complexity, there is no known active exploitation, public exploit code (Metasploit, Nuclei, ExploitDB), or significant community discussion or media coverage.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
<= 3.4CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:nettle_project:nettle:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 3.0

4.7MEDIUM

CVSS:3.0/AV:P/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N

Attack Vector
PHYSICAL
Attack Complexity
HIGH
Privileges Required
HIGH
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
CHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
HIGH
Integrity Impact
NONE
Availability Impact
NONE
Exploitability Score
0.3
Impact Score
4.0
CvssVersion
3.0

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
1.49%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
71.5%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-26
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0149 is in the 99th percentile among its peer group of 152 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.1 Bluesky, 0.0 Mastodon, and 0.1 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.2 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Vendor Patches (3)

redhatend of lifevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: nettle
redhatend of lifevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Virtualization 4Fixed in: redhat-virtualization-host
redhatend of lifevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Virtualization 4Fixed in: rhvm-appliance

Vendor Advisories (1)

redhatCVE-2018-16869Moderate

nettle: Leaky data conversion exposing a manager oracle

Nov 30, 2018

References

cat.eyalro.net
Technical DescriptionThird Party Advisory
bugzilla.redhat.com / show_bug.cgi
Issue TrackingThird Party Advisory
securityfocus.com / bid/106092
Broken LinkThird Party AdvisoryVDB Entry