Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting matrix-synapse package, versions [,1.62.0)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.13% (49th percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-PYTHON-MATRIXSYNAPSE-3012895
  • published 1 Sep 2022
  • disclosed 31 Aug 2022
  • credit Unknown

How to fix?

Upgrade matrix-synapse to version 1.62.0 or higher.

Overview

matrix-synapse is an ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to incorrect application of event authorization rules.

Mitigation

If it's not possible to update to the fixed version, the user can disable Federation by setting federation_domain_whitelist to an empty list ([]).

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
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Snyk

Recommended
5.3 medium
  • 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)
    Low
Expand this section

NVD

7.5 high