Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting simple_asn1 package, versions >=0.6.0 <0.6.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.2% (59th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-RUST-SIMPLEASN1-1922732
  • published18 Nov 2021
  • disclosed14 Nov 2021
  • creditnmathewson

Introduced: 14 Nov 2021

CVE-2021-45711  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade simple_asn1 to version 0.6.1 or higher.

Overview

simple_asn1 is a simple library for parsing DER-encoded data.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) when parsing the old ASN.1 UTCTime time format. If an attacker provides a UTCTime where the first character is ASCII but the second character is above 0x7f, a string slice operation in the from_der_ function will try to slice into the middle of a UTF-8 character, and cause a panic.

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