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Helm vulnerable to denial of service through string value parsing

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Dec 14, 2022 in helm/helm • Updated Feb 21, 2023

Package

gomod helm.sh/helm/v3 (Go)

Affected versions

<= 3.10.2

Patched versions

3.10.3

Description

Fuzz testing, by Ada Logics and sponsored by the CNCF, identified input to functions in the strvals package that can cause a stack overflow. In Go, a stack overflow cannot be recovered from. Applications that use functions from the strvals package in the Helm SDK can have a Denial of Service attack when they use this package and it panics.

Impact

The strvals package contains a parser that turns strings into Go structures. For example, the Helm client has command line flags like --set, --set-string, and others that enable the user to pass in strings that are merged into the values. The strvals package converts these strings into structures Go can work with. Some string inputs can cause array data structures to be created causing a stack overflow.

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 a stack overflow. Helm is not a long running service so the panic will not affect future uses of the Helm client.

Patches

This issue has been resolved in 3.10.3.

Workarounds

SDK users can validate strings supplied by users won't create large arrays causing significant memory usage before passing them to the strvals functions.

For more information

Helm's security policy is spelled out in detail in our SECURITY document.

Credits

Disclosed by Ada Logics in a fuzzing audit sponsored by CNCF.

References

@hickeyma hickeyma published to helm/helm Dec 14, 2022
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Dec 14, 2022
Reviewed Dec 14, 2022
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Dec 15, 2022
Last updated Feb 21, 2023

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

EPSS score

0.089%
(39th percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2022-23524

GHSA ID

GHSA-6rx9-889q-vv2r

Source code

Credits

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