CVE-2024-35238
Published: 27 May 2024
Summary
CVE-2024-35238 is a medium-severity Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) vulnerability. Its CVSS base score is 5.3 (Medium).
Operationally, ranked in the top 41.5% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-1522
Vulnerability details
Minder by Stacklok is an open source software supply chain security platform. Minder prior to version 0.0.51 is vulnerable to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack which could allow an attacker to crash the Minder server and deny other users access to…
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it. The root cause of the vulnerability is that Minders sigstore verifier reads an untrusted response entirely into memory without enforcing a limit on the response body. An attacker can exploit this by making Minder make a request to an attacker-controlled endpoint which returns a response with a large body which will crash the Minder server. Specifically, the point of failure is where Minder parses the response from the GitHub attestations endpoint in `getAttestationReply`. Here, Minder makes a request to the `orgs/$owner/attestations/$checksumref` GitHub endpoint (line 285) and then parses the response into the `AttestationReply` (line 295). The way Minder parses the response on line 295 makes it prone to DoS if the response is large enough. Essentially, the response needs to be larger than the machine has available memory. Version 0.0.51 contains a patch for this issue. The content that is hosted at the `orgs/$owner/attestations/$checksumref` GitHub attestation endpoint is controlled by users including unauthenticated users to Minders threat model. However, a user will need to configure their own Minder settings to cause Minder to make Minder send a request to fetch the attestations. The user would need to know of a package whose attestations were configured in such a way that they would return a large response when fetching them. As such, the steps needed to carry out this attack would look as such: 1. The attacker adds a package to ghcr.io with attestations that can be fetched via the `orgs/$owner/attestations/$checksumref` GitHub endpoint. 2. The attacker registers on Minder and makes Minder fetch the attestations. 3. Minder fetches attestations and crashes thereby being denied of service.
- 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.
This control implements explicit throttling on session allocation, addressing the weakness of allocating resources without limits.
Plan testing exercises resource allocation limits and throttling during simulated failures, directly addressing weaknesses that allow unbounded resource use.
Contingency plan updates ensure recovery strategies address unbounded resource allocation, making it harder for attackers to exploit lack of throttling to cause prolonged outages.
Provides continuity when unbounded resource allocation at the primary site leads to exhaustion and downtime.
Alternate services allow operations to continue when primary allocation of resources lacks limits or throttling.
Explicit planning of security-related actions requires defining limits, windows, and resource allocations, making allocation without throttling far less likely.
Measures of performance include tracking allocation behavior and throttling effectiveness, reducing the window for resource exhaustion attacks.
Imposes an inactivity-based limit on network resource allocation, throttling the number of concurrently held connections.