Debian Long Term Support / LTS Security Information / 2022 / Security Information -- DLA-3031-1 modsecurity-apache

Debian Security Advisory

DLA-3031-1 modsecurity-apache -- LTS security update

Date Reported:

28 May 2022

Affected Packages:

modsecurity-apache

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2021-42717.

More information:

It was discovered that there was a potential resource exhaustion attack in modsecurity-apache, an Apache module which inspects HTTP requests with the aim of preventing typical web application attacks such as XSS and SQL.

• CVE-2021-42717

  ModSecurity 3.x through 3.0.5 mishandles excessively nested JSON objects. Crafted JSON objects with nesting tens-of-thousands deep could result in the web server being unable to service legitimate requests. Even a moderately large (e.g., 300KB) HTTP request can occupy one of the limited NGINX worker processes for minutes and consume almost all of the available CPU on the machine. Modsecurity 2 is similarly vulnerable: the affected versions include 2.8.0 through 2.9.4.

For Debian 9 Stretch, this problem has been fixed in version 2.9.1-2+deb9u1.

We recommend that you upgrade your modsecurity-apache packages.

Further information about Debian LTS security advisories, how to apply these updates to your system and frequently asked questions can be found at: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS