An issue was discovered in the chacha20 crate before 0.2.3 for Rust. A ChaCha20 counter overflow makes it easier for attackers to determine plaintext.

Affected: crates.io: chacha20

An issue was discovered in the chacha20 crate before 0.2.3 for Rust. A ChaCha20 counter overflow makes it easier for attackers to determine plaintext.

Affected: crates.io: chacha20

The ChaCha20 stream cipher can produce a maximum of 2^32 blocks (~256GB) before the 32-bit counter overflows. Releases of the `chacha20` crate prior to v0.2.3 allow generating keystreams larger than this, including seeking past the limit. When this occurs, the keystream is duplicated, with failure modes similar to nonce reuse (i.e. exposure of the XOR of two plaintexts).

The v0.2.3 release now panics in this event, rather than exposing the duplicated keystream. Note this is a "hot fix" solution to the problem and future releases will pursue returning an error in this case.

Users of the `chacha20poly1305` crate are unaffected by this as this crate properly asserts the length of the plaintext is less than the maximum allowed (`P_MAX` as described in RFC 8439 Section 2.8).