CVE-2022-23913: Apache ActiveMQ Artemis DoS via uncontrolled memory consumption

CVE-2022-23913 · Severity: high · CVSS 7.5 · Published 2022-02-06

Technologies: Apache Activemq Artemis. Vendors: Maven, Apache.

Executive brief

Apache ActiveMQ Artemis is a high-performance message broker used to facilitate communication between different software applications. A vulnerability in how it handles incoming data packets allows an attacker to crash the service by forcing it to consume excessive amounts of memory. This can lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, disrupting business operations and message delivery.

Technical details

A vulnerability exists in Apache ActiveMQ Artemis (specifically within the artemis-core-client and XidCodecSupport) due to improper validation of user-supplied lengths during memory allocation. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send a handcrafted packet with a large 'claimed size' value for XID data. The application attempts to allocate a byte array based on this value without sufficient boundary checks against the actual buffer capacity, leading to an OutOfMemoryError (OOM) and subsequent JVM crash. This issue is addressed in versions 2.19.1 and 2.20.0 by implementing defensive checks in the safeReadBytes method.

Affected products

Apache ActiveMQ Artemis < 2.19.1, < 2.20.0

Timeline

2022-02-04: advisory: NVD published CVE-2022-23913
2022-02-06: advisory: GitHub Advisory published
2021-12-03: patched: Fix merged into main branch

References

Related threats

org.apache.activemq:artemis-core-client Vulnerable to Out-of-Bounds Write