Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting openssl-universal package, versions >=1.0.1, <1.0.1.20


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
40.26% (98th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-COCOAPODS-OPENSSLUNIVERSAL-535973
  • published27 Nov 2019
  • disclosed22 Aug 2016
  • creditQuan Luo

Introduced: 22 Aug 2016

CVE-2016-2179  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-399  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade OpenSSL-Universal to version 1.0.1.20 or higher.

Overview

OpenSSL-Universal is a complete solution to OpenSSL on iOS and OSX

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The DTLS implementation in does not properly restrict the lifetime of queue entries associated with unused out-of-order messages, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) by maintaining many crafted DTLS sessions simultaneously, related to d1_lib.c, statem_dtls.c, statem_lib.c, and statem_srvr.c.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

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