Remote memory exhaustion in ckb
Key facts
- Attack vector
- —
- Privileges required
- —
- User interaction
- —
- Attack complexity
- —
- Impact type
- Denial of service
- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
- —
- Fix status
- Fixed
No CVSS vector from any source. Fix status from GitHub. Impact type from CWE-400.
Summary
In the ckb sync protocol, SyncState maintains a HashMap called 'misbehavior' that keeps a score of a peer's violations of the protocol. This HashMap is keyed to PeerIndex (an alias for SessionId), and entries are never removed from it. SessionId is an integer that increases monotonically with every new connection. A remote attacker can manipulate this HashMap to grow forever, resulting in degraded performance and ultimately a panic on allocation failure or being killed by the OS, depending on the platform. This is a critical severity security bug. It could be exploited to create a targeted or network-wide denial of service, to reduce the hash power of the network as part of a 51% attack, and perhaps in other creative ways. An attack is trivial: 1. connect to another node 2. send an invalid sync protocol request, such as `SendHeaders` for non-consecutive blocks 3. disconnect 4. repeat
Why it matters now
SSVC decision points
Not available: CISA has not published SSVC decision points for this record.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected versions | Fixed in | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | ckb (crates.io) | before 0.40.0 | 0.40.0 | Patch available | GHSA-48vq-8jqv-gm6f |
- ckb (crates.io) Vendor— Affected before 0.40.0 Fixed in 0.40.0 Patch available GHSA-48vq-8jqv-gm6f
Remediation
- Fix · GHSA-48vq-8jqv-gm6f ckb (crates.io) Fixed in 0.40.0 Advisory →
Timeline
- 2026-10-03 Threatist record created from GHSA-48vq-8jqv-gm6f
References
Sources
This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Sources and licences