Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting org.json4s:json4s-jackson package, versions [,4.1.0-M2)

org.json4s:json4s-jackson is an a single AST to be used by other scala json libraries. In addition to the native parser there is also an implementation that uses jackson for parsing to the AST. The jackson module includes most of the jackson-module-scala functionality and the ability to use it with the lift-json AST.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). Parsing of large JSON numbers that are bound on doubles or floats and have 1000000 decimal digits can took more than 14 seconds on modern CPUs. Numerical (BigDecimal, Double, Float, BigInt, Long, Int, etc.) fields , collections or arrays are potentially vulnerable to this attack.

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

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