Stack-based Buffer Overflow Affecting com.google.protobuf:protobuf-java package, versions [,3.25.5) [4.0.0-rc-1,4.27.5) [4.28.0-RC1,4.28.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.04% (11th percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-COMGOOGLEPROTOBUF-8055227
  • published 19 Sep 2024
  • disclosed 19 Sep 2024
  • credit Alexis Challande

How to fix?

Upgrade com.google.protobuf:protobuf-java to version 3.25.5, 4.27.5, 4.28.2 or higher.

Overview

com.google.protobuf:protobuf-java is a Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Stack-based Buffer Overflow via the parsing of nested groups or series of SGROUP tags as unknown fields with DiscardUnknownFieldsParser or Java Protobuf Lite parser, or against Protobuf map fields. An attacker can cause infinite recursion by sending malicious Protocol Buffer data.

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

version 4.0
version 3.1
Expand this section

Snyk

Recommended
8.7 high
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Network
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Attack Requirements (AT)
    None
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    None
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Confidentiality (VC)
    None
  • Integrity (VI)
    None
  • Availability (VA)
    High
  • Confidentiality (SC)
    None
  • Integrity (SI)
    None
  • Availability (SA)
    None