Executive brief
MOOS is a lightweight middleware platform used for real-time communication in robotics and autonomous systems. A vulnerability in the message deserialization logic allows unauthenticated attackers to crash the MOOSDB (the central message broker) by sending a specially crafted network message with a malformed string length field, causing an unhandled exception and service outage.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a deserialization flaw in CMOOSMsg::operator>> that fails to validate that serialized string lengths are non-negative. An unauthenticated attacker can send a crafted network packet to the MOOSDB port with a negative length value in a string field. This causes the deserialization routine to throw an unhandled exception, terminating the MOOSDB process. The attack requires network access to the MOOSDB port but no authentication; it causes a denial-of-service condition affecting all MOOS clients dependent on the database service.
Affected products
- MOOS core-moos through 10.4.0
Timeline
- 2026-09-03: disclosed