Minder is a software supply chain security platform. Prior to version 0.0.49, the Minder REST ingester is vulnerable to a denial of service attack via an attacker-controlled REST endpoint that can crash the Minder server. The REST ingester allows users to interact with REST endpoints to fetch data for rule evaluation. When fetching data with the REST ingester, Minder sends a request to an endpoint and will use the data from the body of the response as the data to evaluate against a certain rule. If the response is sufficiently large, it can drain memory on the machine and crash the Minder server. The attacker can control the remote REST endpoints that Minder sends requests to, and they can configure the remote REST endpoints to return responses with large bodies. They would then instruct Minder to send a request to their configured endpoint that would return the large response which would crash the Minder server. Version 0.0.49 fixes this issue.
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.