Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting com.thoughtworks.xstream:xstream package, versions [0,1.4.20)


0.0
medium

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 0.84% (82nd percentile)
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NVD
7.5 high
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SUSE
5.9 medium
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Red Hat
7.5 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-COMTHOUGHTWORKSXSTREAM-3091180
  • published 31 Oct 2022
  • disclosed 31 Oct 2022
  • credit Václav Haisman

How to fix?

Upgrade com.thoughtworks.xstream:xstream to version 1.4.20 or higher.

Overview

com.thoughtworks.xstream:xstream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). If the parser is running on user supplied input, an attacker may supply content that causes the parser to crash by stack overflow.

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