CVE-2018-15756: DoS Attack via Range Requests
Severity
Low
Vendor
Spring by Pivotal
Description
Spring Framework, version 5.1, versions 5.0.x prior to 5.0.10, versions 4.3.x prior to 4.3.20, and older unsupported versions on the 4.2.x branch provide support for range requests when serving static resources through the ResourceHttpRequestHandler
, or starting in 5.0 when an annotated controller returns an org.springframework.core.io.Resource
. A malicious user (or attacker) can add a range header with a high number of ranges, or with wide ranges that overlap, or both, for a denial of service attack.
This vulnerability affects applications that depend on either spring-webmvc or spring-webflux. Such applications must also have a registration for serving static resources (e.g. JS, CSS, images, and others), or have an annotated controller that returns an org.springframework.core.io.Resource
.
Spring Boot applications that depend on spring-boot-starter-web or spring-boot-starter-webflux are ready to serve static resources out of the box and are therefore vulnerable.
Affected VMware Products and Versions
Severity is low unless otherwise noted.
- Spring Framework 5.1
- Spring Framework 5.0.0 to 5.0.9
- Spring Framework 4.3 to 4.3.19
- Older unsupported versions going back to 4.2 are also affected
Mitigation
Users of affected versions should apply the following mitigation:
- 5.1 users should upgrade to 5.1.1
- 5.0.x users should upgrade to 5.0.10
- 4.3.x users should upgrade to 4.3.20
- 4.2.x users should upgrade to a supported branch.
No further mitigation steps are necessary.
Note the following when evaluating the impact:
- Support for Range requests was introduced in version 4.2. Therefore versions prior to 4.2 are not affected by this issue.
- Support for returning an
org.springfamework.core.io.Resource
from an annotated controller was introduced in 5.0. Therefore versions prior to 5.0 can only be impacted through a registration to serve static resources.
Credit
This issue was identified and responsibly reported by Nicholas Starke from Aruba Threat Labs.
History
2018-10-16: Initial vulnerability report published.