CometBFT memory leak

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic was found in CometBFT. The affected element is an unknown function. Executing a manipulation can lead to memory leak. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2023-34451. The attack can be executed remotely. There is not any exploit available. Upgrading the affected component is advised.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic was found in CometBFT (version unknown). This vulnerability affects an unknown function. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a memory leak vulnerability. The CWE definition for the vulnerability is CWE-401. The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory. As an impact it is known to affect availability. CVE summarizes:

CometBFT is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine and replicates it on many machines. The mempool maintains two data structures to keep track of outstanding transactions: a list and a map. These two data structures are supposed to be in sync all the time in the sense that the map tracks the index (if any) of the transaction in the list. In `v0.37.0`, and `v0.37.1`, as well as in `v0.34.28`, and all previous releases of the CometBFT repo2, it is possible to have them out of sync. When this happens, the list may contain several copies of the same transaction. Because the map tracks a single index, it is then no longer possible to remove all the copies of the transaction from the list. This happens even if the duplicated transaction is later committed in a block. The only way to remove the transaction is by restarting the node. The above problem can be repeated on and on until a sizable number of transactions are stuck in the mempool, in order to try to bring down the target node. The problem is fixed in releases `v0.34.29` and `v0.37.2`. Some workarounds are available. Increasing the value of `cache_size` in `config.toml` makes it very difficult to effectively attack a full node. Not exposing the transaction submission RPC's would mitigate the probability of a successful attack, as the attacker would then have to create a modified (byzantine) full node to be able to perform the attack via p2p.

The weakness was released 07/04/2023 as GHSA-w24w-wp77-qffm. The advisory is shared for download at github.com. This vulnerability was named CVE-2023-34451 since 06/06/2023. There are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available. The MITRE ATT&CK project declares the attack technique as T1499.

Upgrading eliminates this vulnerability. Applying a patch is able to eliminate this problem. The bugfix is ready for download at github.com. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

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Productinfo

Name

• CometBFT

Website

• Product: https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft/

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