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


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-NCURSES-5426099
  • published18 Apr 2023
  • disclosed18 Apr 2023
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 18 Apr 2023

CVE-2023-29491  (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) which allows local users to trigger security-relevant memory corruption via malformed data in a terminfo database file that is found in $HOME/.terminfo or reached via the TERMINFO or TERM environment variables. This has been patched in 6.4 patch 20230408.

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