Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting commonmarker package, versions <0.23.9


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.09% (41st percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-RUBY-COMMONMARKER-5603111
  • published 2 Apr 2023
  • disclosed 2 Apr 2023
  • credit nwellnhof

How to fix?

Upgrade commonmarker to version 0.23.9 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to polynomial time complexity issue, when parsing text which leads with either large numbers of > or - characters.

Mitigation

Users unable to upgrade should validate that their input comes from trusted sources.

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
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