CVE-2022-36055: Denial of service in Helm

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2022-36055 is a medium (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in helm. EPSS estimates a 1.12% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 66.1% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 01-09-2022
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 23-04-2025
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Helm is a tool for managing Charts. Charts are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources. Fuzz testing, provided by the CNCF, identified input to functions in the _strvals_ package that can cause an out of memory panic. The _strvals_ package contains a parser that turns strings in to Go structures. The _strvals_ package converts these strings into structures Go can work with. Some string inputs can cause array data structures to be created causing an out of memory panic. Applications that use the _strvals_ package in the Helm SDK to parse user supplied input can suffer a Denial of Service when that input causes a panic that cannot be recovered from. The Helm Client will panic with input to `--set`, `--set-string`, and other value setting flags that causes an out of memory panic. Helm is not a long running service so the panic will not affect future uses of the Helm client. This issue has been resolved in 3.9.4. SDK users can validate strings supplied by users won't create large arrays causing significant memory usage before passing them to the _strvals_ functions.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
• CWE-770Allocation of Resources Without Limits or ThrottlingThe product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any intended restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated.