GHSA-ppxx-5m9h-6vxfMediumCVSS 6.4

quic-go's path validation mechanism can be exploited to cause denial of service

Published
January 10, 2024
Last Modified
February 21, 2024

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

An attacker can cause its peer to run out of memory sending a large number of PATH_CHALLENGE frames. The receiver is supposed to respond to each PATH_CHALLENGE frame with a PATH_RESPONSE frame. The attacker can prevent the receiver from sending out (the vast majority of) these PATH_RESPONSE frames by collapsing the peers congestion window (by selectively acknowledging received packets) and by manipulating the peer's RTT estimate.

I published a more detailed description of the attack and its mitigation in this blog post: https://seemann.io/posts/2023-12-18-exploiting-quics-path-validation/

There's no way to mitigate this attack, please update quic-go to a version that contains the fix.

🎯 Affected products4

  • go/github.com/quic-go/quic-go:= 0.40.0
  • go/github.com/quic-go/quic-go:>= 0.39.0, < 0.39.4
  • go/github.com/quic-go/quic-go:>= 0.38.0, < 0.38.2
  • go/github.com/quic-go/quic-go:< 0.37.7

🔗 References (14)