Bug 1216423 (CVE-2023-45802) - VUL-0: CVE-2023-45802: apache2: HTTP/2 stream memory not reclaimed right away on RST
Summary: VUL-0: CVE-2023-45802: apache2: HTTP/2 stream memory not reclaimed right away...
Status: REOPENED
Alias: CVE-2023-45802
Product: SUSE Security Incidents
Classification: Novell Products
Component: Incidents (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other Other
: P3 - Medium : Normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: David Anes
QA Contact: Security Team bot
URL: https://smash.suse.de/issue/382446/
Whiteboard: CVSSv3.1:SUSE:CVE-2023-45802:7.5:(AV:...
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: CVE-2023-44487 1216176
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Reported: 2023-10-19 15:50 UTC by SMASH SMASH
Modified: 2024-07-18 17:45 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:
Found By: Security Response Team
Services Priority:
Business Priority:
Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: ---
IT Deployment: ---


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Comment 1 Gabriele Sonnu 2023-10-19 15:53:10 UTC
Severity: moderate

Affected versions:

- Apache HTTP Server 2.4.17 through 2.4.57

Description:

When a HTTP/2 stream was reset (RST frame) by a client, there was a time window were the request's memory resources were not reclaimed immediately. Instead, de-allocation was deferred to connection close. A client could send new requests and resets, keeping the connection busy and open and causing the memory footprint to keep on growing. On connection close, all resources were reclaimed, but the process might run out of memory before that.

This was found by the reporter during testing of CVE-2023-44487 (HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Exploit) with their own test client. During "normal" HTTP/2 use, the probability to hit this bug is very low. The kept memory would not become noticeable before the connection closes or times out.

Users are recommended to upgrade to version 2.4.58, which fixes the issue.

Credit:

Will Dormann of Vul Labs (finder)
David Warren of Vul Labs (finder)

References:

https://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_24.html
https://httpd.apache.org/
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-45802

Timeline:

2023-10-12: reported
Comment 9 David Anes 2024-07-04 11:31:05 UTC
Oh, I see my mistake now, I thought this was just the RST CVE, which apache2 is not impacted as it is. Instead it's a side-effect of that one (discovered later) because a possible DDoS via memory exhaustion can be performed... and I thought this was only affecting it because while using mod_http2 (which was fixed at the time). I had everything mixed up in my head.

I'm reopening this issue and assigning it back to me. Also, already working on the fix:

* https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/8943c469eb6e60726cc4f73e3d787173c059c5ef

Thanks for the review Marcus, you are on point, as always. Once fixed I'll send it back to sec for review again.