CVE-2023-51443

FreeSWITCH susceptible to Denial of Service via DTLS Hello packets during call initiation

MEDIUM
5.9
CVSS Score
Published: December 27, 2023 at 04:30 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 06:40 AM UTC
2 products affected across 2 vendorsFreeswitchFreeswitch

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Severity
MEDIUM5.9
Exploit prediction
EPSS 1%
SSVC
PoC

Description

FreeSWITCH is a Software Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation from proprietary telecom switches to a software implementation that runs on any commodity hardware. Prior to version 1.10.11, when handling DTLS-SRTP for media setup, FreeSWITCH is susceptible to Denial of Service due to a race condition in the hello handshake phase of the DTLS protocol. This attack can be done continuously, thus denying new DTLS-SRTP encrypted calls during the attack. If an attacker manages to send a ClientHello DTLS message with an invalid CipherSuite (such as `TLS_NULL_WITH_NULL_NULL`) to the port on the FreeSWITCH server that is expecting packets from the caller, a DTLS error is generated. This results in the media session being torn down, which is followed by teardown at signaling (SIP) level too. Abuse of this vulnerability may lead to a massive Denial of Service on vulnerable FreeSWITCH servers for calls that rely on DTLS-SRTP. To address this vulnerability, upgrade FreeSWITCH to 1.10.11 which includes the security fix. The solution implemented is to drop all packets from addresses that have not been validated by an ICE check.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 1.10.11
Affected range stops below 1.10.11, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
v < 1.10.11
Affected range stops below 1.10.11, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCPoCAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
HIGH
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-703

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