Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting rustc-serialize package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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Exploit Maturity
Proof of concept

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RUST-RUSTCSERIALIZE-2359038
  • published23 Jan 2022
  • disclosed1 Jan 2022
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 1 Jan 2022

CVE NOT AVAILABLE CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for rustc-serialize.

Overview

rustc-serialize is a Serialization and deserialization support provided by the compiler in the form of derive(RustcEncodable, RustcDecodable).

NOTE: This crate is deprecated in favor of serde. No new feature development will happen in this crate, although bug fixes proposed through PRs will still be merged. It is very highly recommended by the Rust Library Team that you use serde, not this crate.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). When parsing JSON using json::Json::from_str, there is no limit to the depth of the stack, therefore deeply nested objects can cause a stack overflow, which aborts the process.

PoC:

fn main() {
    let _ = rustc_serialize::json::Json::from_str(&"[0,[".repeat(10000));
}

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

References

CVSS Scores

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