CVE-2023-42503 Apache Commons Compress: Denial of service via CPU consumption for malformed TAR file
Attackers can cause denial of service via CPU exhaustion by crafting malformed TAR files with excessive precision in time headers.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- A user has to click or open something
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-42503?
CVE-2023-42503 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache Commons Compress, published on 14 Sep 2023. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.
Official description
Improper Input Validation, Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in Apache Commons Compress in TAR parsing.This issue affects Apache Commons Compress: from 1.22 before 1.24.0.
Users are recommended to upgrade to version 1.24.0, which fixes the issue.
A third party can create a malformed TAR file by manipulating file modification times headers, which when parsed with Apache Commons Compress, will cause a denial of service issue via CPU consumption.
In version 1.22 of Apache Commons Compress, support was added for file modification times with higher precision (issue # COMPRESS-612 [1]). The format for the PAX extended headers carrying this data consists of two numbers separated by a period [2], indicating seconds and subsecond precision (for example “1647221103.5998539”). The impacted fields are “atime”, “ctime”, “mtime” and “LIBARCHIVE.creationtime”. No input validation is performed prior to the parsing of header values.
Parsing of these numbers uses the BigDecimal [3] class from the JDK which has a publicly known algorithmic complexity issue when doing operations on large numbers, causing denial of service (see issue # JDK-6560193 [4]). A third party can manipulate file time headers in a TAR file by placing a number with a very long fraction (300,000 digits) or a number with exponent notation (such as “9e9999999”) within a file modification time header, and the parsing of files with these headers will take hours instead of seconds, leading to a denial of service via exhaustion of CPU resources. This issue is similar to CVE-2012-2098 [5].
[1]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COMPRESS-612 [2]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html#tag_20_92_13_05 [3]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html [4]: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-6560193 [5]: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-2098
Only applications using CompressorStreamFactory class (with auto-detection of file types), TarArchiveInputStream and TarFile classes to parse TAR files are impacted. Since this code was introduced in v1.22, only that version and later versions are impacted.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-42503?
2 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.commons:commons-compress. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
org.apache.commons:commons-compress Maven | From 1.22 | 1.24.0 |
org.apache.commons:commons-compress Maven | From 1.22 | 1.24.0 |
Products include Apache Commons Compress.
How do I fix CVE-2023-42503?
Upgrade org.apache.commons:commons-compress to 1.24.0 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-2023-42503 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-42503 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Apache Commons Compress
- CVE-2024-25710 Apache Commons Compress: Denial of service caused by an infinite loop for a corrupted DUMP file
- CVE-2021-35515 Apache Commons Compress 1.6 to 1.20 denial of service vulnerability
- CVE-2021-35516 Apache Commons Compress 1.6 to 1.20 denial of service vulnerability
- CVE-2021-35517 Apache Commons Compress 1.1 to 1.20 denial of service vulnerability
- CVE-2021-36090 Apache Commons Compress 1.0 to 1.20 denial of service vulnerability
Sources
Also known as CLEANSTART-2026-RB49901, CLEANSTART-2026-UD67941, DEBIAN-CVE-2023-42503, GHSA-cgwf-w82q-5jrr, MINI-2955-hv34-2hpw, ROOT-APP-MAVEN-CVE-2023-42503 and 1 more.