High severity · published Aug 9, 2023
CVE-2023-33953
gRPC contains a vulnerability that allows hpack table accounting errors could lead to unwanted disconnects between clients and servers in exceptional cases/ Three vectors were…
7.5
CVSS
0.5%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
gRPC contains a vulnerability that allows hpack table accounting errors could lead to unwanted disconnects between clients and servers in exceptional cases/ Three vectors were found that allow the following DOS attacks:
- Unbounded memory buffering in the HPACK parser
- Unbounded CPU consumption in the HPACK parser
The unbounded CPU consumption is down to a copy that occurred per-input-block in the parser, and because that could be unbounded due to the memory copy bug we end up with an O(n^2) parsing loop, with n selected by the client.
The unbounded memory buffering bugs:
- The header size limit check was behind the string reading code, so we needed to first buffer up to a 4 gigabyte string before rejecting it as longer than 8 or 16kb.
- HPACK varints have an encoding quirk whereby an infinite number of 0’s can be added at the start of an integer. gRPC’s hpack parser needed to read all of them before concluding a parse.
- gRPC’s metadata overflow check was performed per frame, so that the following sequence of frames could cause infinite buffering: HEADERS: containing a: 1 CONTINUATION: containing a: 2 CONTINUATION: containing a: 3 etc…
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.5% · higher than 41% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
GR
Grpc · Grpc
before 1.53.2; 1.54.0 before 1.54.3; 1.55.0 before 1.55.2; 1.56.0 before 1.56.2 · source: NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-33953
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-33953
Vendor Advisory
https://cloud.google.com/support/bulletins#gcp-2023-022
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