Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-coyote package, versions [8.5.0,8.5.13) [9-alpha,9.0.0.M19)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    83.28% (99th percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-ORGAPACHETOMCAT-31434
  • published 21 May 2017
  • disclosed 11 Apr 2017
  • credit Chun Han Hsiao

Overview

org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-coyote In Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.0.M18 and 8.5.0 to 8.5.12, the handling of an HTTP/2 GOAWAY frame for a connection did not close streams associated with that connection that were currently waiting for a WINDOW_UPDATE before allowing the application to write more data. These waiting streams each consumed a thread. A malicious client could therefore construct a series of HTTP/2 requests that would consume all available processing threads.

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

version 3.1
Expand this section

Snyk

Recommended
7.5 high
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Network
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    None
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High