CVE-2020-5303CWE-789

Denial of service in Tendermint

Low · published April 10, 2020

CVSS v3.1
3.1
EPSS
1%
Percentile
71.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

Tendermint before versions 0.33.3, 0.32.10, and 0.31.12 has a denial-of-service vulnerability. Tendermint does not limit the number of P2P connection requests. For each p2p connection, it allocates XXX bytes. Even though this memory is garbage collected once the connection is terminated (due to duplicate IP or reaching a maximum number of inbound peers), temporary memory spikes can lead to OOM (Out-Of-Memory) exceptions. Additionally, Tendermint does not reclaim activeID of a peer after it's removed in Mempool reactor. This does not happen all the time. It only happens when a connection fails (for any reason) before the Peer is created and added to all reactors. RemovePeer is therefore called before AddPeer, which leads to always growing memory (activeIDs map). The activeIDs map has a maximum size of 65535 and the node will panic if this map reaches the maximum. An attacker can create a lot of connection attempts (exploiting above denial of service), which ultimately will lead to the node panicking. These issues are patched in Tendermint 0.33.3 and 0.32.10.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
3.1 · LOW
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.01369 · 71.7th percentile
Weakness
CWE-789 · Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value
Published
2020-04-10T18:30Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 10 APR 18:30Z
    Denial of service in Tendermint
    cvelistv5