Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting ox package, versions <2.8.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.26% (67th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RUBY-OX-20438
  • published5 Nov 2017
  • disclosed26 Oct 2017
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 26 Oct 2017

CVE-2017-15928  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade ox to version 2.8.1 or higher.

Overview

ox is a fast XML parser and object serializer that uses only standard C lib.

Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). In the Ox gem 2.8.0 for Ruby, the process crashes with a segmentation fault when a crafted input is supplied to parse_obj. NOTE: the vendor has stated "Ox should handle the error more gracefully" but has not confirmed a security implication.

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 Base Scores

version 3.1