Microsoft kicks off the first Patch Tuesday of 2020 with the disclosure of CVE-2020-0601, a highly critical flaw in the cryptographic library for Windows.

On January 14, the first Patch Tuesday of 2020, a critical vulnerability in the Microsoft Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (CryptoAPI) was announced. This flaw was identified and reported to Microsoft by the National Security Agency (NSA).

CVE-2020-0601 is a spoofing vulnerability in crypt32.dll, a core cryptographic module in Microsoft Windows responsible for implementing certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in Microsoft’s CryptoAPI.

According to the NSA, successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow attackers to deliver malicious code that appears to be from a trusted entity. The analysis notes some examples of where validation of trust would be impacted:

• HTTPs connections
• Signed files and emails
• Signed executable code launched as user-mode processes

You can read more about this flaw and the Tenable plugins available to identify CVE-2020-0601 on our blog.