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Memory Exhaustion Attack against QUIC's Path Validation Mechanism

Moderate
marten-seemann published GHSA-ppxx-5m9h-6vxf Jan 10, 2024

Package

gomod quic-go (Go)

Affected versions

v0.40.0, <= v0.39.3, <= v0.38.1, <= v0.37.6

Patched versions

v0.40.1, v0.39.4, v0.38.2, v0.37.7

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.

Severity

Moderate

CVE ID

CVE-2023-49295

Weaknesses

No CWEs

Credits