CVE Catalog

CVE-2023-33953

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.41%

33th percentile - higher than 33% of all known CVEs

Summary

gRPC contains a vulnerability that may lead to unwanted disconnects between clients and servers in exceptional cases. Three vectors were found that can lead to DoS attacks related to unbounded memory buffering and unbounded CPU consumption in the HPACK parser.

Risk Assessment

This vulnerability can lead to serious availability issues, causing unpredictable disconnections and excessive consumption of system resources. An attacker could exploit these flaws to disrupt the operation of gRPC-based applications.

Recommendation

It is recommended to update gRPC to the latest version that includes fixes for these vulnerabilities. Additionally, monitoring and resource limiting for applications using gRPC may help mitigate the risk.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

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…

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS