Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core package, versions [2.3.0-rc1,2.7.7)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-COMFASTERXMLJACKSONCORE-31520
  • published20 Sept 2017
  • disclosed25 Aug 2016
  • creditgmethwin@github

Introduced: 25 Aug 2016

CVE NOT AVAILABLE CWE-399  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core to version 2.7.7 or higher.

Overview

com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core is a Core Jackson abstractions, basic JSON streaming API implementation

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). When WRITE_BIGDECIMAL_AS_PLAIN setting is enabled, Jackson will attempt to write out the whole number, no matter how large the exponent. The following sample code will trigger an out of memory exception:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper().enable(JsonGenerator.Feature.WRITE_BIGDECIMAL_AS_PLAIN);
mapper.writeValueAsString(new java.math.BigDecimal("9.223372E+1010671858"));

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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