kafka-python prior to 2.3.2 contains a denial-of-service vulnerability in the protocol parser that allows a malicious broker or machine-in-the-middle attacker to exhaust memory or hang connections by sending a crafted 4-byte frame length value without bounds validation. Attackers can send a specially crafted frame length through the receive_bytes() function to trigger either a multi-gigabyte memory allocation or an uncaught ValueError that leaves the connection in a broken state, causing requests to hang and consumers to stop heartbeating until restart.
Weakness
The product allocates memory based on an untrusted, large size value, but it does not ensure that the size is within expected limits, allowing arbitrary amounts of memory to be allocated.
Affected Software
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kafka-python | Dpkp | * | 2.3.2 (excluding) |
| Python-kafka | Ubuntu | upstream | * |