It may be possible to have an extremely long aggregation pipeline in conjunction with a specific stage/operator and cause a stack overflow due to the size of the stack frames used by that stage. If an attacker could cause such an aggregation to occur, they could maliciously crash MongoDB in a DoS attack. This vulnerability affects MongoDB Server v4.4 versions prior to and including 4.4.28, MongoDB Server v5.0 versions prior to 5.0.4 and MongoDB Server v4.2 versions prior to 4.2.16.
Workaround: >= v4.2.16 users and all v4.4 users can add the –setParameter internalPipelineLengthLimit=50 instead of the default 1000 to mongod at startup to prevent a crash.
Weakness
A stack-based buffer overflow condition is a condition where the buffer being overwritten is allocated on the stack (i.e., is a local variable or, rarely, a parameter to a function).
Affected Software
| Name |
Vendor |
Start Version |
End Version |
| Mongodb |
Mongodb |
4.2.0 (including) |
4.2.16 (excluding) |
| Mongodb |
Mongodb |
4.4.0 (including) |
4.4.11 (excluding) |
| Mongodb |
Mongodb |
5.0.0 (including) |
5.0.4 (excluding) |
| Mongodb |
Ubuntu |
bionic |
* |
| Mongodb |
Ubuntu |
trusty |
* |
| Mongodb |
Ubuntu |
trusty/esm |
* |
| Mongodb |
Ubuntu |
xenial |
* |
Potential Mitigations
- Use automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are offered by certain compilers or compiler extensions. Examples include: the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice, which provide various mechanisms including canary-based detection and range/index checking.
- D3-SFCV (Stack Frame Canary Validation) from D3FEND [REF-1334] discusses canary-based detection in detail.
- Run or compile the software using features or extensions that randomly arrange the positions of a program’s executable and libraries in memory. Because this makes the addresses unpredictable, it can prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to exploitable code.
- Examples include Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) [REF-58] [REF-60] and Position-Independent Executables (PIE) [REF-64]. Imported modules may be similarly realigned if their default memory addresses conflict with other modules, in a process known as “rebasing” (for Windows) and “prelinking” (for Linux) [REF-1332] using randomly generated addresses. ASLR for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink since it would require relocating the libraries at run-time, defeating the whole purpose of prelinking.
- For more information on these techniques see D3-SAOR (Segment Address Offset Randomization) from D3FEND [REF-1335].
References