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CVE-2024-31497

Exploitation: none CVSS 5.9 MEDIUM

CVSS base score: 5.9 (Medium) CISA · v3.1

Score assigned by CISA's Vulnrichment program; the vendor's CVE record did not include one.

Vendor: n/a   Product: n/a

Description

In PuTTY 0.68 through 0.80 before 0.81, biased ECDSA nonce generation allows an attacker to recover a user's NIST P-521 secret key via a quick attack in approximately 60 signatures. This is especially important in a scenario where an adversary is able to read messages signed by PuTTY or Pageant. The required set of signed messages may be publicly readable because they are stored in a public Git service that supports use of SSH for commit signing, and the signatures were made by Pageant through an agent-forwarding mechanism. In other words, an adversary may already have enough signature information to compromise a victim's private key, even if there is no further use of vulnerable PuTTY versions. After a key compromise, an adversary may be able to conduct supply-chain attacks on software maintained in Git. A second, independent scenario is that the adversary is an operator of an SSH server to which the victim authenticates (for remote login or file copy), even though this server is not fully trusted by the victim, and the victim uses the same private key for SSH connections to other services operated by other entities. Here, the rogue server operator (who would otherwise have no way to determine the victim's private key) can derive the victim's private key, and then use it for unauthorized access to those other services. If the other services include Git services, then again it may be possible to conduct supply-chain attacks on software maintained in Git. This also affects, for example, FileZilla before 3.67.0, WinSCP before 6.3.3, TortoiseGit before 2.15.0.1, and TortoiseSVN through 1.14.6.

Lifecycle Timeline

Each milestone comes from a different source, so gaps between them are gaps in what those sources publish, not evidence that nothing happened. EPSS history for this CVE holds 139 points from 2024-04-20, tracked daily from 2026-09-09; earlier points are weekly, which dates a spike to within a week. Peak probability 23.3% on 2026-05-23.

Published Applicability

Red Hat CSAF/VEX 0 affected · 0 fixed · 1 not affected
CVE List v5 (CNA container) 1 affected · 0 fixed · 0 not affected
CVE List v5 (ADP/Vulnrichment) 1 affected · 0 fixed · 0 not affected

Check whether a specific version is affected →

What each source publishes about which product versions carry this vulnerability, kept as written rather than merged. Absence here means no source has published applicability data, not that nothing is affected.

Research & News Coverage

No mentions found in monitored research blogs or news feeds.

Detection & Exploitation

Exploit / Pen Test
Network IDS/IPS
none published
Host / SIEM
none published

Coverage across public collections only: Nuclei and OpenVAS NVT (scan); Snort and Suricata ET Open (network); Sigma and YARA (host/SIEM); Metasploit, Exploit-DB and public GitHub repositories (exploit). Absence here means nothing public was found, not that detection is impossible.
GitHub PoC repositories are collected automatically by PoC-in-GitHub (CC0) and are not vetted: some are fakes and some are malware. Treat them as evidence that code was published, not as code to run.
OpenVAS coverage derives from the Greenbone Community Feed, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0; its individual Vulnerability Tests are licensed GNU GPL v2.

Distribution Status

Debian · filezilla bookworm trixie 3.67.0-1 forky 3.67.0-1 sid 3.67.0-1 scope: local
Debian · putty bookworm 0.78-2+deb12u2 trixie 0.81-1 forky 0.81-1 sid 0.81-1 scope: local

Where the distribution has shipped a fix, and in which version. Green means the release has resolved it, amber that it is still open. Data from the Debian Security Tracker, used under Debian's MIT / GPLv2+ terms. Debian is upstream of several other distributions, so a fix here often precedes theirs.

CISA Assessment (Vulnrichment / SSVC)

none
no
partial
5.9 MEDIUM
—
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CWE-338 — Use of Cryptographically Weak Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG)
2024-04-24

Listed By

SourceDateRecord
CISA Vulnrichment 2024-04-24 source record →

Referenced in Advisories

DateAdvisoryIssuer
2024-05-14 2024-039: Critical Putty Client Vulnerability CERT-EU

Weaponization Timeline — Offensive & Testing Tools

No exploit-tool sightings recorded for this CVE.

Evidence tiers are explained on the About page — a merged Metasploit module is far stronger evidence than a distro package mention.

External References