CVE-2023-22460 go-ipld-prime json codec may panic if asked to encode bytes

What is CVE-2023-22460?

CVE-2023-22460 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in go-ipld-prime, published on 4 Jan 2023. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

go-ipld-prime is an implementation of the InterPlanetary Linked Data (IPLD) spec interfaces, a batteries-included codec implementations of IPLD for CBOR and JSON, and tooling for basic operations on IPLD objects. Encoding data which contains a Bytes kind Node will pass a Bytes token to the JSON encoder which will panic as it doesn't expect to receive Bytes tokens. Such an encode should be treated as an error, as plain JSON should not be able to encode Bytes. This only impacts uses of the `json` codec. `dag-json` is not impacted. Use of `json` as a decoder is not impacted. This issue is fixed in v0.19.0. As a workaround, one may prefer the `dag-json` codec, which has the ability to encode bytes.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-22460?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime. It affects 1 product.

Products include Protocol Go-Ipld-Prime.

How do I fix CVE-2023-22460?

Upgrade github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime to 0.19.0 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-2023-22460 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-22460 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in go-ipld-prime

• CVE-2026-35480 go-ipld-prime's DAG-CBOR decoder unbounded memory allocation from CBOR headers Medium 6.2

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-c653-6hhg-9x92, GO-2023-1269.