CVE-2023-5954
Description
A flaw was found in The HashiCorp Vault, which may be susceptible to a denial of service due to an unbounded consumption of memory when handling policy requests. This issue may allow an attacker to trigger policy checks by sending multiple inbound client requests that create a logger that is never removed from memory, leading to excessive memory consumption, causing a denial of service condition.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 5.9 | 7.5 | 5.9 |
| Attack Vector | Network | Network | Network |
| Attack Complexity | High | Low | High |
| Privileges Required | None | None | None |
| User Interaction | None | None | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | Unchanged | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | None | None | None |
| Integrity Impact | None | None | None |
| Availability Impact | High | High | High |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Red Hat CVSS v3 Score Explanation
In order to exploit this vulnerability certain conditions would have to be met, the inbound request would have to cause a policy check and that would only happen if it is explicitly turned on, apart from that the memory exhaustion would only happen if the underlying OS doesn't fix it. Hence such a thing is out of attackers' control and which is why attack complexity has been marked as high.
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Availability
Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; DoS: Instability; DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)
Most memory leaks result in general product reliability problems, but if an attacker can intentionally trigger a memory leak, the attacker might be able to launch a denial of service attack (by crashing or hanging the program) or take advantage of other unexpected program behavior resulting from a low memory condition.
Other
Technical Impact: Reduce Performance
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