CVE-2020-5303

Denial of service in Tendermint

State
Published
Severity
3.1 Low
Published
Apr 10, 2020
Updated
Aug 4, 2024
Reserved
Jan 2, 2020

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.13.1 LowCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-789 Uncontrolled Memory Allocation

Affected Products

ProductVersions
TendermintTendermint
  • >= 0.32.0, < 0.32.10Affected
  • >= 0.33.0, < 0.33.3Affected
  • < 0.31.12Affected

References

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