Vulnerabilities / GHSA-h45m-mgcp-q388

critical

GHSA-h45m-mgcp-q388

openssl-encrypt: TOTP rate limiter is in-memory only — not shared across workers, lost on restart

Published Modified
In the Trivy database since at least 24 Oct 2026, 07:11 UTCWhen it arrived before that build is not recorded.

Severity by source

GHSA9.1CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Trivy's own label is CRITICAL. Rated critical by GHSA.

Description

## Severity: HIGH ### Summary The TOTP brute-force rate limiter in `openssl_encrypt_server/modules/pepper/totp.py` at **lines 47-98** uses an in-memory `defaultdict(list)` as a class variable. ### Affected Code ```python class TOTPRateLimiter: def __init__(self, ...): self.attempts: Dict[str, List[datetime]] = defaultdict(list) self.lockouts: Dict[str, datetime] = {} class TOTPService: _rate_limiter = TOTPRateLimiter() # Class variable, in-memory only ``` ### Impact 1. Rate limit state is **not shared** across multiple server instances/workers — an attacker can distribute attempts 2. All rate limit state is **lost on server restart** — allows immediate retry 3. In multi-worker deployments, each worker has independent rate limit state ### Recommended Fix - Use Redis or the database for rate limit state storage - Or use a shared-memory approach for multi-worker deployments - At minimum, persist lockout state to survive restarts ### Fix Fixed in commit `2749bc0` on branch `releases/1.4.x` — added abstract RateLimitBackend with InMemoryBackend and DatabaseBackend implementations; defaults to DatabaseBackend when DB available.

Affected packages and fixed versions

SourcePackageFixed in
pip::GitHub Security Advisory pipopenssl-encrypt1.4.0

References

Vulnerability data compiled from the Trivy vulnerability database (trivy-db, Aqua Security, Apache License 2.0), which aggregates third-party advisories. CVE records are published by The MITRE Corporation under the CVE Terms of Use; CVE is a trademark of MITRE. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Severity, titles and advisory data from the GitHub Advisory Database (CC BY 4.0), Red Hat security data (CC BY 4.0) and the other sources linked on each entry. Entries may be summarised or re-formatted; the linked original is the authoritative record.