gjasny

  A: CVE-2022-3602 was originally assessed by the OpenSSL project as CRITICAL as 
  it is an arbitrary 4-byte stack buffer overflow, and such vulnerabilities may 
  lead to remote code execution (RCE).

  During the week of prenotification, several organisations performed testing 
  and gave us feedback on the issue, looking at the technical details of the 
  overflow and stack layout on common architectures and platforms.

  Firstly, we had reports that on certain Linux distributions the stack layout 
  was such that the 4 bytes overwrote an adjacent buffer that was yet to be used 
  and therefore there was no crash or ability to cause remote code execution.

  Secondly, many modern platforms implement stack overflow protections which 
  would mitigate against the risk of remote code execution and usually lead to a 
  crash instead.

  However as OpenSSL is distributed as source code we have no way of knowing how 
  every platform and compiler combination has arranged the buffers on the stack 
  and therefore remote code execution may still be possible on some platforms.

  Our security policy states that a vulnerability might be described as CRITICAL 
  if “remote code execution is considered likely in common situations”. We no 
  longer felt that this rating applied to CVE-2022-3602 and therefore it was 
  downgraded on 1st November 2022 before being released to HIGH.