CVE-2022-23524 Helm vulnerable to Denial of service through string value parsing
Attackers can cause a stack overflow and denial of service in Helm by providing malicious string values to the strvals package.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2022-23524?
CVE-2022-23524 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in helm, published on 15 Dec 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Helm is a tool for managing Charts, pre-configured Kubernetes resources. Versions prior to 3.10.3 are subject to Uncontrolled Resource Consumption, resulting in Denial of Service. Input to functions in the _strvals_ package can cause a stack overflow. In Go, a stack overflow cannot be recovered from. Applications that use functions from the _strvals_ package in the Helm SDK can have a Denial of Service attack when they use this package and it panics. This issue has been patched in 3.10.3. SDK users can validate strings supplied by users won't create large arrays causing significant memory usage before passing them to the _strvals_ functions.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-23524?
4 open source packages ship an affected version, including helm.sh/helm/v3 and helm. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
helm.sh/helm/v3 Go | All versions | 3.10.3 |
helm.sh/helm/v3 Go | All versions | 3.10.3 |
helm.sh/helm/v3 Go | All versions | 3.10.3 |
helm Bitnami | From 3.0.0 | 3.10.3 |
Products include Helm Helm.
How do I fix CVE-2022-23524?
Upgrade helm.sh/helm/v3 to 3.10.3 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-2022-23524 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-23524 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in helm
- CVE-2019-18658 Helm Unsafe Link Following
- CVE-2019-1010275 Helm Improper Certificate Validation
- CVE-2019-25210 Information disclosure in n/a
- CVE-2025-53547 Helm Chart Dependency Updating With Malicious Chart.yaml Content And Symlink Can Lead To Code Execution
- CVE-2020-11013 lookup Function Information Discolosure in Helm
Sources
Also known as AZL-11654, BIT-helm-2022-23524, CLEANSTART-2026-BS54802, GHSA-6rx9-889q-vv2r, GO-2022-1167.