Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner. Prior to 1.4.0, an attacker can point the image request to an arbitrarily large file. Mealie will attempt to retrieve this file in whole. If it can be retrieved, it may be stored on the file system in whole (leading to possible disk consumption), however the more likely scenario given resource limitations is that the container will OOM during file retrieval if the target file size is greater than the allocated memory of the container. At best this can be used to force the container to infinitely restart due to OOM (if so configured in `docker-compose.yml), or at worst this can be used to force the Mealie container to crash and remain offline. In the event that the file can be retrieved, the lack of rate limiting on this endpoint also permits an attacker to generate ongoing requests to any target of their choice, potentially contributing to an external-facing DoS attack. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.4.0.
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource, thereby enabling an actor to influence the amount of resources consumed, eventually leading to the exhaustion of available resources.
Limited resources include memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. If an attacker can trigger the allocation of these limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the attacker could cause a denial of service that consumes all available resources. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as well as its host operating system. There are at least three distinct scenarios which can commonly lead to resource exhaustion:
Resource exhaustion problems are often result due to an incorrect implementation of the following situations:
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:
The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.
The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.