CVE-2019-3559 in Thrift
Summary
by MITRE
Java Facebook Thrift servers would not error upon receiving messages with containers of fields of unknown type. As a result, malicious clients could send short messages which would take a long time for the server to parse, potentially leading to denial of service. This issue affects Facebook Thrift prior to v2019.02.18.00.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 09/12/2023
The vulnerability described in CVE-2019-3559 represents a significant denial of service weakness within Facebook Thrift server implementations that operate on Java platforms. This flaw manifests in the server's handling of malformed protocol messages containing containers with fields of unknown type, creating a scenario where legitimate service operations become severely compromised. The vulnerability specifically impacts Thrift versions prior to v2019.02.18.00, indicating that the issue was recognized and addressed through a targeted software update that improved protocol validation mechanisms.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability lies in the inadequate error handling within the Thrift protocol parsing logic. When malicious clients send carefully crafted short messages containing containers with unknown field types, the server's parsing routine fails to immediately reject these malformed inputs. Instead, the server attempts to process these inputs through its internal parsing mechanisms, which can result in excessive computational overhead and resource consumption. This behavior creates a scenario where a small network packet can trigger substantial processing time, effectively allowing attackers to consume server resources disproportionately to the size of their input.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability presents a serious risk to service availability and system stability. The denial of service potential arises because the server's processing time increases exponentially with the complexity of malformed inputs, creating a resource exhaustion scenario. Attackers can leverage this weakness to consume CPU cycles, memory, and other system resources through relatively small network requests, potentially causing legitimate service operations to become unavailable or significantly degraded. The impact is particularly severe in high-traffic environments where multiple concurrent connections could be simultaneously exploited.
The vulnerability aligns with CWE-400, which addresses the weakness of uncontrolled resource consumption, and demonstrates characteristics consistent with the ATT&CK technique T1499.004 for network denial of service attacks. Organizations utilizing Facebook Thrift servers should implement immediate mitigation strategies including upgrading to the patched version v2019.02.18.00 or later, implementing rate limiting controls on incoming connections, and deploying protocol validation measures that can detect and reject malformed inputs before they reach the core parsing logic. Additionally, network monitoring solutions should be configured to identify unusual patterns of resource consumption that might indicate exploitation attempts, while also ensuring that proper input sanitization occurs at multiple layers of the system architecture to prevent similar issues from manifesting in other components.