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CVE-2023-51443

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

Published: Dec 27, 2023Updated: Nov 4, 2025 Sources: CVE List NVD BDUCWE-703

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.

CVSS Vector Breakdown

AV:NAC:LPR:NUI:NS:UC:NI:NA:H
Exploitability
AV:NAttack Vector
Network
AC:LAttack Complexity
Low
PR:NPrivileges Required
None
UI:NUser Interaction
None
Scope
S:UScope
Unchanged
Impact
C:NConfidentiality
None
I:NIntegrity
None
A:HAvailability
High

Weaknesses

Affected Products

signalwirecommercialCommunicationsaka freeswitch (related), sofia-sip (related)

Exploitability

2 exploit sources identified

Exploit details including PoC links, Metasploit modules, and scanner templates are available after registration.

View exploit details
Official Patch Available

References

and 2 more references View all →

Timeline

Published
Dec 27, 2023
Last Updated
Nov 4, 2025

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