CVE-2018-12541 Excessive memory allocation

Medium 6.5 Published 10 Oct 2018 Updated 5 Aug 2024

Attackers can cause memory exhaustion and denial of service by sending large WebSocket upgrade requests to applications using vulnerable Eclipse Vert.x versions.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Any signed-in user
Attackable: Over the internet
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: Available

What is CVE-2018-12541?

CVE-2018-12541 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in The Eclipse Foundation Eclipse Vert.x, published on 10 Oct 2018. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In version from 3.0.0 to 3.5.3 of Eclipse Vert.x, the WebSocket HTTP upgrade implementation buffers the full http request before doing the handshake, holding the entire request body in memory. There should be a reasonnable limit (8192 bytes) above which the WebSocket gets an HTTP response with the 413 status code and the connection gets closed.

Weakness: CWE-119, CWE-789

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-12541?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including io.vertx:vertx-core. It affects 1 product.

Package	Affected	Fixed in
`io.vertx:vertx-core` Maven	From `3.0.0`	`3.5.4`
`io.vertx:vertx-core` Maven	From `3.0.0`	`3.5.4`

Products include Eclipse Vert.x.

How do I fix CVE-2018-12541?

Upgrade io.vertx:vertx-core to 3.5.4 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2018-12541 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-12541 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

Also known as GHSA-45xm-v8gq-7jqx.