Homepage
About Snyk

Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting com.typesafe.play:play_2.12 package, versions [2.8.3, 2.8.16)

0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 0.17% (53rd percentile)
Expand this section
NVD
7.5 high

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications
  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-COMTYPESAFEPLAY-2855273
  • published 3 Jun 2022
  • disclosed 3 Jun 2022
  • credit Gerald Benischke (@beny23), Greg Methvin (@gmethvin), Billy Autrey (@BillyAutrey)
Report a new vulnerability Found a mistake?

Introduced: 3 Jun 2022

CVE-2022-31018 Open this link in a new tab
CWE-400 Open this link in a new tab

How to fix?

Upgrade com.typesafe.play:play_2.12 to version 2.8.16 or higher.

Overview

com.typesafe.play:play_2.12 is a library for building scalable web applications with Java and Scala.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) which can occur when using either the Form#bindFromRequest method on a JSON request body or the Form#bind method directly on a JSON value. If the JSON data being bound to the form contains a deeply-nested JSON object or array, the form binding implementation may consume all available heap space and cause an OutOfMemoryError. If executing on the default dispatcher and akka.jvm-exit-on-fatal-error is enabled—as it is by default—then this can crash the application process. Form.bindFromRequest is vulnerable when using any body parser that produces a type of AnyContent or JsValue in Scala, or one that can produce a JsonNode in Java. This includes Play's default body parser.

Workaround

Applications the do to not need to parse a request body of type application/json can switch from the default body parser to another body parser that supports only the specific type of body they expect.

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