Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting feedparser package, versions [,5.1.2]


0.0
medium

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 3.4% (92nd percentile)
Expand this section
NVD
5.3 medium

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-PYTHON-FEEDPARSER-40096
  • published 21 May 2012
  • disclosed 21 May 2012
  • credit Unknown

Overview

feedparser is a Universal feed parser, handles RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, CDF, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0 feeds Universal Feed Parser (aka feedparser or python-feedparser) before 5.1.2 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via a crafted XML ENTITY declaration in a non-ASCII encoded document.

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

References