Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting org.apache.commons:commons-compress package, versions [1.0,1.21)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
1.37% (87th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-ORGAPACHECOMMONS-1316641
  • published13 Jul 2021
  • disclosed13 Jul 2021
  • creditOSS Fuzz

Introduced: 13 Jul 2021

CVE-2021-36090  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-130  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade org.apache.commons:commons-compress to version 1.21 or higher.

Overview

org.apache.commons:commons-compress is an API for working with compression and archive formats.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). When reading a specially crafted ZIP archive, Compress can be made to allocate large amounts of memory that finally leads to an out-of-memory error even for very small inputs. This could be used to mount a denial of service attack against services that use Compress' zip package.

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

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