Bug 1211737 (CVE-2023-32323)

A malicious user on a Synapse homeserver X with permission to create certain state events can disable outbound federation from X to an arbitrary homeserver Y.

Synapse instances with federation disabled are not affected.

The Matrix protocol allows homeservers to provide an invite_room_state field on a room invite containing a summary of room state. In versions of Synapse up to and including v1.73.0, Synapse did not limit the size of invite_room_state, meaning that it was possible to create an arbitrarily large invite event.

An attacker with an account on a vulnerable Synapse homeserver X could exploit this by having X create an over-sized invite event in a room with a user from another homeserver Y. Once acknowledged by the invitee's homeserver, the invite event would be sent in a batch of events to Y. If the malicious invite is so large that the entire batch is rejected as too large, X's outgoing traffic to Y would become "stuck", meaning that messages and state events created by X would remain unseen by Y.

References:
http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2023-32323
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2209958