Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting log4j:log4j package, versions [1.0.4,]


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.21% (60th percentile)

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-LOG4J-3358774
  • published 11 Mar 2023
  • disclosed 10 Mar 2023
  • credit Garrett Tucker of Red Hat

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for log4j:log4j.

Overview

log4j:log4j is a 1.x branch of the Apache Log4j project. Note: Log4j 1.x reached End of Life in 2015, and is no longer supported.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). When using the Chainsaw or SocketAppender components with Log4j 1.x on JRE less than 1.7, an attacker that manages to cause a logging entry involving a specially-crafted, deeply nested hashmap or hashtable (depending on which logging component is in use) to be processed could exhaust the available memory in the virtual machine and achieve denial of service when the object is deserialized.

This issue affects Apache Log4j before 2. Affected users are recommended to update to Log4j 2.x org.apache.logging.log4j/log4j-core.

NOTE: This vulnerability only affects products that are no longer supported by the maintainer.

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

References

CVSS Scores

version 3.1
Expand this section

Snyk

Recommended
5.9 medium
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Network
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    High
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    None
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High
Expand this section

NVD

7.5 high
Expand this section

Red Hat

7.5 high