Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key Affecting golang-github-nats-io-nkeys package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
medium

Based on Ubuntu security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.09% (28th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UBUNTU2004-GOLANGGITHUBNATSIONKEYS-6039686
  • published25 Jun 2025
  • disclosed31 Oct 2023

Introduced: 31 Oct 2023

CVE-2023-46129  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-321  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-325  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for Ubuntu:20.04 golang-github-nats-io-nkeys.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream golang-github-nats-io-nkeys package and not the golang-github-nats-io-nkeys package as distributed by Ubuntu. See How to fix? for Ubuntu:20.04 relevant fixed versions and status.

NATS.io is a high performance open source pub-sub distributed communication technology, built for the cloud, on-premise, IoT, and edge computing. The cryptographic key handling library, nkeys, recently gained support for encryption, not just for signing/authentication. This is used in nats-server 2.10 (Sep 2023) and newer for authentication callouts. In nkeys versions 0.4.0 through 0.4.5, corresponding with NATS server versions 2.10.0 through 2.10.3, the nkeys library's xkeys encryption handling logic mistakenly passed an array by value into an internal function, where the function mutated that buffer to populate the encryption key to use. As a result, all encryption was actually to an all-zeros key. This affects encryption only, not signing.
FIXME: FILL IN IMPACT ON NATS-SERVER AUTH CALLOUT SECURITY. nkeys Go library 0.4.6, corresponding with NATS Server 2.10.4, has a patch for this issue. No known workarounds are available. For any application handling auth callouts in Go, if using the nkeys library, update the dependency, recompile and deploy that in lockstep.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1