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


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.06% (30th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-XEN-3104609
  • published4 Nov 2022
  • disclosed4 Nov 2022
  • creditJulien Grall

Introduced: 4 Nov 2022

CVE-2022-42316  (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 allowing malicious guests to cause xenstored to allocate vast amounts of memory.

Note:

There are multiple ways how guests can cause large memory allocations in xenstored:

  • by issuing new requests to xenstored without reading the responses, causing the responses to be buffered in memory

  • by causing large number of watch events to be generated via setting up multiple xenstore watches and then e.g. deleting many xenstore nodes below the watched path

  • by creating as many nodes as allowed with the maximum allowed size and path length in as many transactions as possible

  • by accessing many nodes inside a transaction

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