Executive brief
MOOS core-moos is a lightweight middleware communication framework used in robotic and autonomous systems. A denial of service vulnerability in the MOOSDB server allows an attacker to send incomplete connection requests that cause the accept thread to block indefinitely, preventing all legitimate clients from connecting to the system and effectively stopping all operations dependent on the message bus.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a denial of service caused by a blocking receive without timeout in the MOOSCommServer::ListenLoop() accept thread during the wire-protocol handshake. An unauthenticated attacker can establish a TCP connection to the MOOSDB port (default 9000) and send no data or incomplete data, causing the accept thread to block indefinitely while holding the socket-list lock. This lock contention prevents the acceptance of all subsequent legitimate client connections, effectively disabling the message broker. The root cause is the absence of a socket read timeout during the initial handshake phase. No fix version is currently indicated in the advisory.
Affected products
- MOOS core-moos through 10.4.0
Timeline
- 2026-09-03: disclosed