Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-coyote package, versions [7.0.0,7.0.59]


0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 1.34% (86th percentile)
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NVD
7.5 high
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Red Hat
7.5 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JAVA-ORGAPACHETOMCAT-31440
  • published 21 May 2017
  • disclosed 17 Feb 2017
  • credit Unknown

Overview

org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-coyote It was discovered that a programming error in the processing of HTTPS requests in the Apache Tomcat servlet and JSP engine may result in denial of service via an infinite loop. The denial of service is easily achievable as a consequence of backporting a CVE-2016-6816 fix but not backporting the fix for Tomcat bug 57544. Distributions affected by this backporting issue include Debian (before 7.0.56-3+deb8u8 and 8.0.14-1+deb8u7 in jessie) and Ubuntu.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package