Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting puppet package, versions <2.6.15>=2.7.0, <2.7.13


Severity

Recommended
0.0
low
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
1.34% (87th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RUBY-PUPPET-20312
  • published28 Feb 2017
  • disclosed2 Apr 2011
  • creditPuppet Labs

Introduced: 2 Apr 2011

CVE-2012-1987  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade puppet to version 2.6.15, 2.7.13 or higher.

Overview

puppet is an automated configuration management tool. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

  • By using the symlink vulnerability described in CVE-2012-1986, it is possible to create a memory consumption DoS attack, due to the way Puppet sends files via REST requests, the thread handling the request will block forever.
  • A filesystem DoS attack is possible by constructing a marshaled form of a Puppet::FileBucket::File object, a malicious user can craft a REST request to have this object written to any place in the filesystem and fill it.

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

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