Denial of Service via Array Length Manipulation in seroval

Executive Summary

This vulnerability in seroval versions 1.4.0 and below allows an attacker to override encoded array lengths during deserialization with an excessively large value. This causes the deserialization process to take significantly more processing time, leading to a denial of service (DoS) condition. The issue arises because the deserialization trusts the encoded array length, which can be manipulated to consume excessive resources. [2]

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Impact Analysis

The vulnerability can cause a denial of service by making the deserialization process consume excessive CPU time, potentially making the application unresponsive or unavailable. It can be exploited remotely over the network without any privileges or user interaction, impacting the availability of services using seroval versions 1.4.0 and below. [2]

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability can be detected by monitoring for unusually high CPU usage or processing time during deserialization of data using the seroval library versions 1.4.0 and below. Since the issue involves overriding encoded array lengths with excessively large values, detection could involve inspecting network traffic or logs for payloads containing abnormally large array length fields targeting seroval deserialization. Specific commands are not provided in the resources. [2]

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Mitigation Strategies

The immediate mitigation step is to upgrade the seroval package to version 1.4.1 or later, where the vulnerability is fixed by removing the encoding of array lengths and computing array length dynamically during deserialization. This prevents attackers from injecting artificially large array lengths and avoids the denial of service condition. [2, 1]

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