UBUNTU-CVE-2023-33953

Advisory lineage Upstream: 1 Downstream: 0
Upstream
Published: 09 Aug 2023, 13:15
Last modified:20 May 2026, 16:13

Vulnerability Summary

Overall Risk (default)
medium
30/100
CVSS Score
7.5 HIGH
3.1 (osv_ubuntu)
EPSS Score
No data
KEV
Not listed
Ransomware
No reports
Public exploits
None found
Dark Web
Not detected

Timeline

09 Aug 2023, 13:15
Published
Vulnerability first disclosed
20 May 2026, 16:13
Last Modified
Vulnerability information updated

Description

gRPC contains a vulnerability that allows hpack table accounting errors could lead to unwanted disconnects between clients and servers in exceptional cases/ Three vectors were found that allow the following DOS attacks: - Unbounded memory buffering in the HPACK parser - Unbounded CPU consumption in the HPACK parser The unbounded CPU consumption is down to a copy that occurred per-input-block in the parser, and because that could be unbounded due to the memory copy bug we end up with an O(n^2) parsing loop, with n selected by the client. The unbounded memory buffering bugs: - The header size limit check was behind the string reading code, so we needed to first buffer up to a 4 gigabyte string before rejecting it as longer than 8 or 16kb. - HPACK varints have an encoding quirk whereby an infinite number of 0’s can be added at the start of an integer. gRPC’s hpack parser needed to read all of them before concluding a parse. - gRPC’s metadata overflow check was performed per frame, so that the following sequence of frames could cause infinite buffering: HEADERS: containing a: 1 CONTINUATION: containing a: 2 CONTINUATION: containing a: 3 etc…

CVSS Metrics

  • v3.1HIGHScore: 7.5CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected Systems

  • ubuntugrpc

    all | all | all | all | all | all | all

References (3)