CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-27978 — Shibboleth Identify Provider 3.x before 3.4.6 has a denial of service flaw

High CVSS 7.5

Shibboleth Identify Provider 3.x before 3.4.6 has a denial of service flaw. A remote unauthenticated attacker can cause a login flow to trigger Java heap exhaustion due to the creation of objects in the Java Servlet container session.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
java/maven
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • shibboleth / identity_provider

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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