CVE-2023-31124

Publication date 25 May 2023

Last updated 4 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

c-ares is an asynchronous resolver library. When cross-compiling c-ares and using the autotools build system, CARES_RANDOM_FILE will not be set, as seen when cross compiling aarch64 android. This will downgrade to using rand() as a fallback which could allow an attacker to take advantage of the lack of entropy by not using a CSPRNG. This issue was patched in version 1.19.1.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
c-ares	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.10 kinetic	Not affected
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not affected
	20.04 LTS focal	Not affected
	18.04 LTS bionic	Not affected
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	14.04 LTS trusty	Ignored end of standard support

Notes

mdeslaur

this has no impact on binaries shipped by Debian/Ubuntu

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
c-ares	Upstream: c493022

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	3.7 · Low
Attack vector	Network
Attack complexity	High
Privileges required	None
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	None
Integrity impact	Low
Availability impact	None
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N