Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting github.com/cometbft/cometbft/mempool/v0 package, versions <0.34.29>=0.37.0-alpha.3 <0.37.2
Threat Intelligence
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
Do your applications use this vulnerable package?
In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.
Test your applicationsSnyk Learn
Learn about Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities in an interactive lesson.
Start learning- Snyk IDSNYK-GOLANG-GITHUBCOMCOMETBFTCOMETBFTMEMPOOLV0-5752412
- published4 Jul 2023
- disclosed4 Jul 2023
- creditPierre Sutra
Introduced: 4 Jul 2023
CVE-2023-34451 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade github.com/cometbft/cometbft/mempool/v0 to version 0.34.29, 0.37.2 or higher.
Overview
github.com/cometbft/cometbft/mempool/v0 is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine - written in any programming language - and securely replicates it on many machines.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The mempool maintains two data structures to keep track of outstanding transactions: a list and a map. When these structures get out of sync, the list may contain several copies of the same transaction. Because the map tracks a single index, it is then no longer possible to remove all the copies of the transaction from the list. This happens even if the duplicated transaction is later committed in a block. The only way to remove the transaction is by restarting the node. This can be exploited to bring down the target node.
Workaround
Increasing the value of cache_size in config.toml makes it very difficult to effectively attack a full node. Not exposing the transaction submission RPCs would lower the probability of a successful attack, as the attacker would then have to create a modified (byzantine) full node to be able to perform the attack via p2p.
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
wspackage