Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting nginx package, versions [1.1.3,1.15.6)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Proof of concept
EPSS
0.23% (62nd percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications

Snyk Learn

Learn about Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities in an interactive lesson.

Start learning
  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-NGINX-2333636
  • published12 Jan 2022
  • disclosed7 Nov 2018
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 7 Nov 2018

CVE-2018-16845  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade nginx to version 1.15.6 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) nginx before versions 1.15.6, 1.14.1 has a vulnerability in the ngx_http_mp4_module, which might allow an attacker to cause infinite loop in a worker process, cause a worker process crash, or might result in worker process memory disclosure by using a specially crafted mp4 file. The issue only affects nginx if it is built with the ngx_http_mp4_module (the module is not built by default) and the .mp4. directive is used in the configuration file. Further, the attack is only possible if an attacker is able to trigger processing of a specially crafted mp4 file with the ngx_http_mp4_module.

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