CVE-2020-26257 Denial of service attack via incorrect parameters to federation APIs

2020-12-0918:25:15

CWE-79

CWE-400

GitHub_M

www.cve.org

cve-2020-26257

denial of service

federation apis

matrix synapse

injection attack

version 1.23.1

workaround

CVSS3

6.5

Attack Vector

NETWORK

Attack Complexity

LOW

Privileges Required

LOW

User Interaction

NONE

Scope

UNCHANGED

Confidentiality Impact

NONE

Integrity Impact

NONE

Availability Impact

HIGH

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

AI Score

6.4

Confidence

High

EPSS

0.002

Percentile

52.7%

JSON

Matrix is an ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP. Synapse is a reference “homeserver” implementation of Matrix. A malicious or poorly-implemented homeserver can inject malformed events into a room by specifying a different room id in the path of a /send_join, /send_leave, /invite or /exchange_third_party_invite request. This can lead to a denial of service in which future events will not be correctly sent to other servers over federation. This affects any server which accepts federation requests from untrusted servers. The Matrix Synapse reference implementation before version 1.23.1 the implementation is vulnerable to this injection attack. Issue is fixed in version 1.23.1. As a workaround homeserver administrators could limit access to the federation API to trusted servers (for example via federation_domain_whitelist).

CNA Affected

[
  {
    "product": "synapse",
    "vendor": "matrix-org",
    "versions": [
      {
        "status": "affected",
        "version": "< 1.23.1"
      }
    ]
  }
]