Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting memcached/memcached package, versions [0,1.5.6)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
93.93% (100th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-MEMCACHEDMEMCACHED-2365343
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed5 Mar 2018
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 5 Mar 2018

CVE-2018-1000115  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade memcached/memcached to version 1.5.6 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). Memcached version 1.5.5 contains an Insufficient Control of Network Message Volume (Network Amplification, CWE-406) vulnerability in the UDP support of the memcached server that can result in denial of service via network flood (traffic amplification of 1:50,000 has been reported by reliable sources). This attack appear to be exploitable via network connectivity to port 11211 UDP. This vulnerability appears to have been fixed in 1.5.6 due to the disabling of the UDP protocol by default.

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

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