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XStream can cause a Denial of Service by injecting deeply nested objects raising a stack overflow

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Dec 24, 2022 in x-stream/xstream • Updated Jan 7, 2023

Package

maven com.thoughtworks.xstream:xstream (Maven)

Affected versions

< 1.4.20

Patched versions

1.4.20

Description

Impact

The vulnerability may allow a remote attacker to terminate the application with a stack overflow error resulting in a denial of service only by manipulating the processed input stream.

Patches

XStream 1.4.20 handles the stack overflow and raises an InputManipulationException instead.

Workarounds

The only solution is to catch the StackOverflowError in the client code calling XStream.

References

See full information about the nature of the vulnerability and the steps to reproduce it in XStream's documentation for CVE-2022-40151.

Credits

The vulnerability was discovered and reported by Henry Lin of the Google OSS-Fuzz team.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

References

@joehni joehni published to x-stream/xstream Dec 24, 2022
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Dec 30, 2022
Reviewed Dec 30, 2022
Last updated Jan 7, 2023

Severity

High
7.5
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2022-40151

GHSA ID

GHSA-f8cc-g7j8-xxpm

Source code

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