Stack overflow while parsing User-Agent header with deeply nested comments

Date

2021-11-02

CVE

CVE-2021-42697

Description of Vulnerability

The HTTP specification allows arbitrary nesting of comment elements in User-Agent and other headers. While parsing a request containing a User-Agent header with deeply nested comments, Akka HTTP may fail with a stack overflow in the parser. Stack overflows are handled as fatal errors in Akka leading to a complete shutdown of the application.

Severity

Based on our assessment, the CVSS score of this vulnerability is 6.7, based on vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H/E:P/RL:O/RC:C).

Impact

An Akka HTTP application server which is exposed to the internet can be remotely crashed by sending a crafted User-Agent header leading to a loss of availability.

Resolution

Starting from Akka HTTP 10.2.7, parsing of nested comments will be limited to a configurable maximum depth. See akka.http.parsing.max-comment-parsing-depth in the @ref:configuration for more information. The default value for that setting is currently conservatively set to 5.

Workaround

Set akka.http.server.parsing.modeled-header-parsing = off to avoid parsing headers to models. In this case, Akka HTTP will report most headers as RawHeaders. This will likely have consequences for downstream user code which expects headers to be already parsed.

Affected versions

• All akka-http versions prior to 10.2.6

Fixed versions

• akka-http 10.2.7, 10.1.15

Acknowledgements

Thanks, Simone Quatrini of SureCloud, for bringing this issue to our attention.

References

• #3918