CVE-2024-5971

Description

A vulnerability was found in Undertow, where the chunked response hangs after the body was flushed. The response headers and body were sent but the client would continue waiting as Undertow does not send the expected 0\r\n termination of the chunked response. This results in uncontrolled resource consumption, leaving the server side to a denial of service attack. This happens only with Java 17 TLSv1.3 scenarios.

Statement

The identified vulnerability in Undertow, where chunked responses fail to terminate properly under Java 17 with TLSv1.3, represents a significant security concern due to its potential for uncontrolled resource consumption and denial of service (DoS) attacks. This issue arises from Undertow's mishandling of chunked response termination after initial data flushing, leading to clients waiting indefinitely for completion signals that are not sent. Such behavior could be exploited by malicious actors to exhaust server resources, resulting in service degradation or unavailability.

Mitigation

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options don't meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.

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 HatNVDcve.org
Base Score7.5N/A7.5
Attack VectorNetworkN/ANetwork
Attack ComplexityLowN/ALow
Privileges RequiredNoneN/ANone
User InteractionNoneN/ANone
ScopeUnchangedN/AUnchanged
ConfidentialityNoneN/ANone
Integrity ImpactNoneN/ANone
Availability ImpactHighN/AHigh

Vector

Red Hat: 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:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Availability

Technical Impact: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)

Resources including CPU, memory, and stack memory could be rapidly consumed or exhausted, eventually leading to an exit or crash.

Confidentiality

Technical Impact: Read Application Data

In some cases, an application's interpreter might kill a process or thread that appears to be consuming too much resources, such as with PHP's memory_limit setting. When the interpreter kills the process/thread, it might report an error containing detailed information such as the application's installation path.

Frequently Asked Questions

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