Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/utils/parse package, versions <5.0.1-dev.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-GOLANG-GITHUBCOMGRAVITATIONALTELEPORTLIBUTILSPARSE-1040723
  • published21 Jan 2021
  • disclosed17 Nov 2020
  • creditAndrew Lytvynov

Introduced: 17 Nov 2020

CVE NOT AVAILABLE CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/utils/parse to version 5.0.1-dev.1 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The parsing code runtime grows exponentially with nested selectors (e.g. {{a.b.c.d.e.f}}), mostly due to memory churn from slice allocations. If an attacker can submit these expressions for parsing, they can DoS the auth server with relatively small payloads (<1MB).

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 Base Scores

version 3.1