CVE-2021-21293
Published: 02 February 2021
Summary
CVE-2021-21293 is a high-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Typelevel Blaze. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).
Operationally, ranked in the top 38.4% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2021-0580
Vulnerability details
blaze is a Scala library for building asynchronous pipelines, with a focus on network IO. All servers running blaze-core before version 0.14.15 are affected by a vulnerability in which unbounded connection acceptance leads to file handle exhaustion. Blaze, accepts connections…
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unconditionally on a dedicated thread pool. This has the net effect of amplifying degradation in services that are unable to handle their current request load, since incoming connections are still accepted and added to an unbounded queue. Each connection allocates a socket handle, which drains a scarce OS resource. This can also confound higher level circuit breakers which work based on detecting failed connections. The vast majority of affected users are using it as part of http4s-blaze-server <= 0.21.16. http4s provides a mechanism for limiting open connections, but is enforced inside the Blaze accept loop, after the connection is accepted and the socket opened. Thus, the limit only prevents the number of connections which can be simultaneously processed, not the number of connections which can be held open. The issue is fixed in version 0.14.15 for "NIO1SocketServerGroup". A "maxConnections" parameter is added, with a default value of 512. Concurrent connections beyond this limit are rejected. To run unbounded, which is not recommended, set a negative number. The "NIO2SocketServerGroup" has no such setting and is now deprecated. There are several possible workarounds described in the refrenced GitHub Advisory GHSA-xmw9-q7x9-j5qc.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Limiting concurrent sessions directly prevents uncontrolled resource consumption by capping the number of active sessions per user or account.
Contingency plan testing includes resource exhaustion scenarios to verify recovery, making it harder for attackers to sustain exploits that cause uncontrolled consumption.
Updated contingency plans include current procedures to detect, contain, and recover from resource exhaustion, limiting an attacker's ability to sustain impact from uncontrolled consumption.
Alternate site allows resumption of operations if resource exhaustion at the primary site is exploited to cause unavailability.
Alternate telecommunications services enable resumption of essential functions when primary services become unavailable due to uncontrolled resource consumption.
Planning and coordination of security activities (scans, tests, maintenance) directly imposes scheduling and throttling that prevents those activities from producing uncontrolled resource consumption.
Performance metrics and monitoring inherently track resource consumption patterns, making uncontrolled consumption easier to detect and mitigate.
Terminating idle connections bounds resource consumption that would otherwise allow uncontrolled accumulation of open sessions.