Impact

Due to a non-constant-time implementation, information about the private key is leaked through timing information which is observable over the network. An attacker may be able to use that information to recover the key.

Patches

No patch is yet available, however work is underway to migrate to a fully constant-time implementation.

Workarounds

The only currently available workaround is to avoid using the rsa crate in settings where attackers are able to observe timing information, e.g. local use on a non-compromised computer is fine.

References

This vulnerability was discovered as part of the "Marvin Attack", which revealed several implementations of RSA including OpenSSL had not properly mitigated timing sidechannel attacks.

PyO3 0.24.0 added optimized implementations of Iterator::nth and DoubleEndedIterator::nth_back for the BoundListIterator and BoundTupleIterator types. These implementations computed the target index using unchecked usize addition (index + n) before bounds-checking against the sequence length, then read the element via get_item_unchecked.

In nth methods, a sufficiently large n (combined with a non-zero internal index) could cause the addition to overflow and wrap around, producing a small "target index" that passed the bounds check and enabling reads at the front of the list or tuple of elements previously yielded by the iterator.

In nth_back methods, a sufficiently large n could cause underflow in a similar fashion, however would instead allow reads of arbitrary memory past the end of the list or tuple storage.

PyO3 0.29.0 has corrected these methods to use checked arithmetic at the positions which could be at risk of overflow.

PyCFunction::new_closure (and the temporary new_closure_bound complement in the 0.21–0.22 series) required the supplied closure to be Send + 'static but not Sync. The resulting PyCFunction is a Python callable that can be invoked from any Python thread, which means the closure may be called concurrently from multiple threads, and needs a Sync bound to prevent possible data races.

The problem exists under all Python versions but is particularly vulnerable under the newer free-threaded Python variant, which do not have serial execution imposed by the Global Interpreter Lock. Under releases protected by the GIL, the ability to "detach" from the Python interpreter temporarily inside the closure (e.g. by Python::detach) makes it possible for interleaved and/or concurrent execution of various portions of the closure.

PyO3 0.29.0 added a Sync bound to close this thread-safety bug.