CVE-2016-6346 in RESTEasy
Summary
by MITRE
RESTEasy enables GZIPInterceptor, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via unspecified vectors.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/15/2022
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2016-6346 affects RESTEasy, a popular Java-based REST framework that implements the javax.ws.rs API specification. This issue specifically involves the GZIPInterceptor component within the framework, which is designed to compress HTTP responses to reduce bandwidth usage. The flaw manifests when the interceptor processes certain malformed or specially crafted HTTP requests that trigger unexpected behavior in the compression logic, ultimately leading to resource exhaustion and system unavailability.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability stems from inadequate input validation and error handling within the GZIPInterceptor implementation. When RESTEasy processes HTTP requests that contain malformed gzip compression headers or corrupted compressed data, the interceptor fails to properly handle these edge cases, resulting in infinite loops, excessive memory consumption, or thread exhaustion. This behavior aligns with CWE-400, which categorizes unchecked resource consumption as a significant vulnerability pattern in software systems. The interceptor's failure to implement proper bounds checking and recovery mechanisms creates a pathway for attackers to exploit the compression algorithm's processing logic.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability presents a significant risk to web applications and services that rely on RESTEasy for their API implementations. Attackers can leverage this weakness to perform denial of service attacks against targeted systems by sending carefully crafted requests that cause the application server to consume excessive CPU cycles or memory resources. The impact extends beyond simple service disruption, as it can potentially lead to complete application unavailability, affecting business continuity and customer access to critical services. This vulnerability particularly affects organizations using RESTEasy in production environments where high availability and performance are paramount.
The attack surface for this vulnerability is relatively broad, encompassing any RESTEasy-based application that utilizes the GZIPInterceptor for response compression. According to ATT&CK framework category T1499, this represents a denial of service attack vector that can be executed with minimal technical expertise, making it particularly dangerous in environments where such applications are exposed to untrusted network traffic. Organizations should implement immediate mitigations including disabling the GZIPInterceptor for applications that do not require compression, applying the latest security patches from the RESTEasy project maintainers, and implementing network-level rate limiting and monitoring to detect anomalous request patterns that may indicate exploitation attempts. Additionally, proper input validation and error handling should be implemented at the application level to prevent similar issues in other components that may be vulnerable to similar compression-related attacks.