Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting com.opensymphony:xwork-core package, versions [2.1.5,2.1.6]


0.0
medium

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 2.73% (91st percentile)
Expand this section
NVD
5.3 medium

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-COMOPENSYMPHONY-30330
  • published 31 May 2016
  • disclosed 31 May 2016
  • credit Tao Wang

Overview

com.opensymphony:xwork-core is an command-pattern framework that is used to power WebWork as well as other applications. XWork provides an Inversion of Control container, a powerful expression language, data type conversion, validation, and pluggable configuration.

Apache Struts 2.0.0 through 2.3.24.1 does not properly cache method references when used with OGNL before 3.0.12, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (block access to a web site) via unspecified vectors.

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