Denial of service in readExternal method
Key facts
- Attack vector
- Network
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Impact type
- Denial of service
- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
- None · None · High
- Fix status
- Fixed
Attack profile from CVSS 3.1 · NVD. Fix status from CNA and GitHub. Impact type from CWE-400.
Summary
The Security Team noticed that the termination condition of the for loop in the readExternal method is a controllable variable, which, if tampered with, may lead to CPU exhaustion. As a fix, we added an upper bound and termination condition in the read and write logic. We classify it as a "low-priority but useful improvement". SystemDS is a distributed system and needs to serialize/deserialize data but in many code paths (e.g., on Spark broadcast/shuffle or writing to sequence files) the byte stream is anyway protected by additional CRC fingerprints. In this particular case though, the number of decoders is upper-bounded by twice the number of columns, which means an attacker would need to modify two entries in the byte stream in a consistent manner. By adding these checks robustness was strictly improved with almost zero overhead. These code changes are available in versions higher than 2.2.1.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | Apache SystemDS | before 2.2.2 | 2.2.2 | Patch available | CNA |
| — | org.apache.systemds:systemds (Maven) | before 2.2.2 | 2.2.2 | Patch available | GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx |
| — | systemds (PyPI) | before 2.2.2 | 2.2.2 | Patch available | GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx |
- Apache SystemDS VendorApache Affected before 2.2.2 Fixed in 2.2.2 Patch available CNA
- org.apache.systemds:systemds (Maven) Vendor— Affected before 2.2.2 Fixed in 2.2.2 Patch available GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx
- systemds (PyPI) Vendor— Affected before 2.2.2 Fixed in 2.2.2 Patch available GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx
Remediation
- Fix · CNA Apache SystemDS (Apache Software Foundation) Fixed in 2.2.2
- Fix · GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx org.apache.systemds:systemds (Maven) Fixed in 2.2.2 Advisory →
- Fix · GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx systemds (PyPI) Fixed in 2.2.2 Advisory →
Timeline
- 2026-10-02 Threatist record created from CVE-2022-26477
- 2026-10-03 Alias added: GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx
References
Advisory 4
Sources
- CVE-2022-26477 · CVE Program
- CVE-2022-26477 · NVD
- FIRST EPSS
- GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx · GitHub Advisory Database · CC BY 4.0
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