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Signed-poll nonce LRU is in-memory and bounded; replay survives restart + eviction

Low
juev published GHSA-v2jf-442r-6mjh May 24, 2026

Package

gomod github.com/juev/nebula-mesh (Go)

Affected versions

<= 0.3.3

Patched versions

0.3.4

Description

internal/api/pop/nonce.go:25,40,86 + internal/api/server.go:38 — the signed-poll nonce cache is an in-process LRU sized at 65,536 entries. internal/api/updates.go:31 sets pollClockSkew = 5 * time.Minute as the replay window.

Affected

All released versions through v0.3.0 that have shipped the ADR 0004 signed-poll path. (If this is gated behind a feature flag, on a side branch, or not yet on a release tag, please flag — this advisory may not apply to the released artifact yet.)

Threat model

A captured signed-poll request can be replayed:

  1. After any process restart — the in-memory LRU is wiped, so the original nonce becomes "unseen" again. Replay succeeds if the original timestamp is still within the 5-minute skew.
  2. After forced eviction — an attacker with control of any single host can flood >65,536 nonces under their own host_id, driving the global LRU to evict the victim's recorded nonce. Replay then succeeds.

Impact is bounded: a replayed poll fetches the /api/v1/agent/updates body. That body can include a freshly-minted enrollment token if a rekey is pending (updates.go:249-260) — at which point the attacker holds a single-use token they can redeem under their own keypair.

Suggested fix

Two options, either acceptable:

  1. Persist nonces in SQLite keyed by (host_id, nonce) with ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING, retained for the timestamp-skew window. Adds one transactional INSERT per poll; bounded by the skew window (~5 min worth of rows server-wide).
  2. Per-host cap on the LRU instead of a global 65k cap, so one host cannot evict another's records. Combined with shorter skew (≤30s) to bound the post-restart replay window.

Option 1 is more robust; option 2 is lower-implementation-effort.

Severity

Low

CVE ID

No known CVE

Weaknesses

Authentication Bypass by Capture-replay

A capture-replay flaw exists when the design of the product makes it possible for a malicious user to sniff network traffic and bypass authentication by replaying it to the server in question to the same effect as the original message (or with minor changes). Learn more on MITRE.

Credits