CVE-2022-26477 Denial of service in readExternal method

What is CVE-2022-26477?

CVE-2022-26477 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache SystemDS, published on 27 Jun 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The Security Team noticed that the termination condition of the for loop in the readExternal method is a controllable variable, which, if tampered with, may lead to CPU exhaustion. As a fix, we added an upper bound and termination condition in the read and write logic. We classify it as a "low-priority but useful improvement". SystemDS is a distributed system and needs to serialize/deserialize data but in many code paths (e.g., on Spark broadcast/shuffle or writing to sequence files) the byte stream is anyway protected by additional CRC fingerprints. In this particular case though, the number of decoders is upper-bounded by twice the number of columns, which means an attacker would need to modify two entries in the byte stream in a consistent manner. By adding these checks robustness was strictly improved with almost zero overhead. These code changes are available in versions higher than 2.2.1.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-26477?

5 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.systemds:systemds and systemds. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Systemds.

How do I fix CVE-2022-26477?

Upgrade org.apache.systemds:systemds to 2.2.2 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-2022-26477 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-26477 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx, PYSEC-2022-222.