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Apache Commons Compress denial of service vulnerability

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Sep 14, 2023 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Feb 22, 2024

Package

maven org.apache.commons:commons-compress (Maven)

Affected versions

>= 1.22, < 1.24.0

Patched versions

1.24.0

Description

Improper Input Validation, Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in Apache Commons Compress in TAR parsing.This issue affects Apache Commons Compress: from 1.22 before 1.24.0.

Users are recommended to upgrade to version 1.24.0, which fixes the issue.

A third party can create a malformed TAR file by manipulating file modification times headers, which when parsed with Apache Commons Compress, will cause a denial of service issue via CPU consumption.

In version 1.22 of Apache Commons Compress, support was added for file modification times with higher precision (issue # COMPRESS-612 1). The format for the PAX extended headers carrying this data consists of two numbers separated by a period 2, indicating seconds and subsecond precision (for example “1647221103.5998539”). The impacted fields are “atime”, “ctime”, “mtime” and “LIBARCHIVE.creationtime”. No input validation is performed prior to the parsing of header values.

Parsing of these numbers uses the BigDecimal 3 class from the JDK which has a publicly known algorithmic complexity issue when doing operations on large numbers, causing denial of service (see issue # JDK-6560193 4). A third party can manipulate file time headers in a TAR file by placing a number with a very long fraction (300,000 digits) or a number with exponent notation (such as “9e9999999”) within a file modification time header, and the parsing of files with these headers will take hours instead of seconds, leading to a denial of service via exhaustion of CPU resources. This issue is similar to CVE-2012-2098 5.

Only applications using CompressorStreamFactory class (with auto-detection of file types), TarArchiveInputStream and TarFile classes to parse TAR files are impacted. Since this code was introduced in v1.22, only that version and later versions are impacted.

References

Published by the National Vulnerability Database Sep 14, 2023
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Sep 14, 2023
Reviewed Sep 14, 2023
Last updated Feb 22, 2024

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Local
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS score

0.053%
(23rd percentile)

CVE ID

CVE-2023-42503

GHSA ID

GHSA-cgwf-w82q-5jrr
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