CVE-2023-36811 - CVE House
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Status published Medium CVE-2023-36811

Archive spoofing vulnerability in borgbackup

Vulnerability Description

borgbackup is an opensource, deduplicating archiver with compression and authenticated encryption. A flaw in the cryptographic authentication scheme in borgbackup allowed an attacker to fake archives and potentially indirectly cause backup data loss in the repository. The attack requires an attacker to be able to: 1. insert files (with no additional headers) into backups and 2. gain write access to the repository. This vulnerability does not disclose plaintext to the attacker, nor does it affect the authenticity of existing archives. Creating plausible fake archives may be feasible for empty or small archives, but is unlikely for large archives. The issue has been fixed in borgbackup 1.2.5. Users are advised to upgrade. Additionally to installing the fixed code, users must follow the upgrade procedure as documented in the change log. Data loss after being attacked can be avoided by reviewing the archives (timestamp and contents valid and as expected) after any "borg check --repair" and before "borg prune". There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

borg
Vulnerable Versions:
< 1.2.5

Timeline

Official Publish: August 30th, 2023
Last Modified: February 13th, 2025
Added to House: July 22nd, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Weaknesses (CWE)