Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting ffmpeg package, versions [,3.3.3]


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.22% (61st percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-FFMPEG-2368908
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed7 Sept 2017
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 7 Sep 2017

CVE-2017-14170  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-834  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for ffmpeg.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). In libavformat/mxfdec.c in FFmpeg 3.3.3 -> 2.4, a DoS in mxf_read_index_entry_array() due to lack of an EOF (End of File) check might cause huge CPU consumption. When a crafted MXF file, which claims a large "nb_index_entries" field in the header but does not contain sufficient backing data, is provided, the loop would consume huge CPU resources, since there is no EOF check inside the loop. Moreover, this big loop can be invoked multiple times if there is more than one applicable data segment in the crafted MXF file.

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