Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting powerdns package, versions [1.9.0,1.9.4)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (12th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-POWERDNS-6840352
  • published14 May 2024
  • disclosed13 May 2024
  • creditDaniel Stirnimann

Introduced: 13 May 2024

CVE-2024-25581  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade powerdns to version 1.9.4 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) when incoming DNS over HTTPS support is enabled using the nghttp2 provider, and queries are routed to a tcp-only or DNS over TLS backend. An attacker can cause the process to stop by sending a request for a zone transfer over DNS over HTTPS.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by refusing incoming XFR requests via a DNSdist rule: addAction(OrRule({QTypeRule(DNSQType.AXFR), QTypeRule(DNSQType.IXFR)}), RCodeAction(DNSRCode.REFUSED)). Alternatively, switch to the legacy h2o provider by setting library='h2o' in the addDOHLocal directive.

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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