CVE-2022-31018 Denial of service binding form from JSON in Play Framework

What is CVE-2022-31018?

CVE-2022-31018 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in playframework, published on 2 Jun 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Play Framework is a web framework for Java and Scala. A denial of service vulnerability has been discovered in verions 2.8.3 through 2.8.15 of Play's forms library, in both the Scala and Java APIs. This can occur when using either the `Form#bindFromRequest` method on a JSON request body or the `Form#bind` method directly on a JSON value. If the JSON data being bound to the form contains a deeply-nested JSON object or array, the form binding implementation may consume all available heap space and cause an `OutOfMemoryError`. If executing on the default dispatcher and `akka.jvm-exit-on-fatal-error` is enabled—as it is by default—then this can crash the application process. `Form.bindFromRequest` is vulnerable when using any body parser that produces a type of `AnyContent` or `JsValue` in Scala, or one that can produce a `JsonNode` in Java. This includes Play's default body parser. This vulnerability been patched in version 2.8.16. There is now a global limit on the depth of a JSON object that can be parsed, which can be configured by the user if necessary. As a workaround, applications that do not need to parse a request body of type `application/json` can switch from the default body parser to another body parser that supports only the specific type of body they expect.

Weakness: CWE-400

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-31018?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including com.typesafe.play:play_2.12 and com.typesafe.play:play_2.13. It affects 1 product.

Products include Lightbend Play Framework.

How do I fix CVE-2022-31018?

Upgrade com.typesafe.play:play_2.12 to 2.8.16 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-2022-31018 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-31018 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in playframework

• CVE-2014-3630 XML external entity in n/a Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-26882 Data Amplification in Play Framework High 7.5
• CVE-2020-26883 Uncontrolled Recursion in Play Framework High 7.5
• CVE-2020-27196 Out-of-bounds Write in Play Framework High 7.5
• CVE-2019-17598 Play Framework Inadequate Encryption Strength vulnerability High 7.5

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-v8x6-59g4-5g3w.