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CVE-2023-45853

Integer Overflow: Is CVE-2023-45853 real, exploitable, or a false positive? Here's the community verdict.

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signals

public sources

Exploited in wild
Not listed
CISA KEV
Public exploit
None known
Metasploit/EDB/PoC
Base severity
9.8 Critical
CVSS
Exploitation prob.
3%
FIRST EPSS
Weakness
CWE-190 · Integer Overflow
CWE

High CVSS base score, but low real-world exploitation probability (EPSS). Likely less urgent than the score implies.

baseline read

auto · not a community verdict

Real, but low real-world risk

A genuine vulnerability on paper, but EPSS shows little real-world exploitation — the base score may overstate urgency. This is not the same as a false positive.

Based on CVSS · FIRST EPSS

Confirm or dispute →
Affected:ZlibSmihica

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

MiniZip in zlib through 1.3 has an integer overflow and resultant heap-based buffer overflow in zipOpenNewFileInZip4_64 via a long filename, comment, or extra field. NOTE: MiniZip is not a supported part of the zlib product. NOTE: pyminizip through 0.2.6 is also vulnerable because it bundles an affected zlib version, and exposes the applicable MiniZip code through its compress API.

References

NVD MITRE CVE.org

Published

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Community ground truth

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In your experience, is this finding real and exploitable?

awaiting field verdicts
Real, but not a risk here
Not a real issue

Curated baseline: TruePositive's read from public sources is False positive / noise — a starting point, not a community verdict.

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Field notes & remediation

Verdicts are the quick signal. Notes are the evidence and fixes behind them.

  • 0
    Field note · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    Scanners flag this as critical on anything that links zlib, but the bug is actually in MiniZip, a contributed helper that is not part of the core zlib library that distributions ship. zlib's maintainer has noted MiniZip is not a supported component, and Debian marked the core library as unaffected. It is only reachable if your software bundles MiniZip and feeds it attacker-controlled archive entries. For an ordinary libz dependency it is noise.

    How to check: confirm whether your build actually includes and uses MiniZip, not just core zlib.

    Commonly flagged by: Trivy, Grype, Dependabot, OSV-Scanner.

  • 0
    Field note · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    The other side: if you do bundle MiniZip and use its zip-creation functions on attacker-influenced data, the integer overflow is real, so do not blanket-ignore it. The point is to check whether MiniZip is actually in your build before treating the core-zlib flag as critical.

  • 0
    Remediation · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    If you genuinely use MiniZip, update to a patched MiniZip or zlib 1.3.1 or later. Otherwise, document why the core-zlib finding does not apply to your build and move on rather than chasing it.

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Related CVEs

Same weakness: CWE-190 · Integer Overflow.