Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting libexpat/libexpat package, versions [0,]


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.09% (40th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-LIBEXPATLIBEXPAT-6227955
  • published5 Feb 2024
  • disclosed4 Feb 2024
  • creditSnild Dolkow

Introduced: 4 Feb 2024

CVE-2023-52425  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

A fix was pushed into the master branch but not yet published.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to improper handling of large tokens that require multiple buffer fills. An attacker can cause the application to perform numerous full reparsings, leading to excessive resource consumption and service disruption.

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