Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting bind package, versions [,9.17.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.53% (78th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-BIND-2381996
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed19 May 2020
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 19 May 2020

CVE-2020-8616  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade bind to version 9.17.2 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). A malicious actor who intentionally exploits this lack of effective limitation on the number of fetches performed when processing referrals can, through the use of specially crafted referrals, cause a recursing server to issue a very large number of fetches in an attempt to process the referral. This has at least two potential effects: The performance of the recursing server can potentially be degraded by the additional work required to perform these fetches, and The attacker can exploit this behavior to use the recursing server as a reflector in a reflection attack with a high amplification factor.

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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