Randomly-generated alphanumeric strings contain significantly less entropy than expected. The RandomAlphaNumeric and CryptoRandomAlphaNumeric functions always return strings containing at least one digit from 0 to 9. This significantly reduces the amount of entropy in short strings generated by these functions.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - Randomly-generated alphanumeric strings contain significantly less entropy than expected. The     RandomAlphaNumeric and CryptoRandomAlphaNumeric functions always return strings containing at least one     digit from 0 to 9. This significantly reduces the amount of entropy in short strings generated by these     functions. (CVE-2021-4238)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

There are packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability referenced in the following CVE:

  - Randomly-generated alphanumeric strings contain significantly less entropy than expected. The
    RandomAlphaNumeric and CryptoRandomAlphaNumeric functions always return strings containing at least one
    digit from 0 to 9. This significantly reduces the amount of entropy in short strings generated by these
    functions. (CVE-2021-4238)

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 8 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2023:0540 advisory.

    Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh is Red Hat's distribution of the Istio service mesh project, tailored for     installation into an OpenShift Container Platform installation.

    This advisory covers the RPM packages for the release.

    Security Fix(es):

    * goutils: RandomAlphaNumeric and CryptoRandomAlphaNumeric are not as random as they should be     (CVE-2021-4238)

    For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, acknowledgments, and     other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
250933	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2021-4238	Nessus	Misc.	critical
420472	SCA: security update for github.com/Masterminds/goutils (GHSA-xg2h-wx96-xgxr)	Tenable Cloud Security	SCA Checks	critical
420472	SCA: security update for github.com/Masterminds/goutils (GHSA-xg2h-wx96-xgxr)	Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security	SCA Checks	critical
194209	RHEL 8 : Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.1.6 (RHSA-2023:0540)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	critical

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2021-4238

critical

Tenable Plugins

critical

critical

critical

critical