CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-29471 — Synapse is a Matrix reference homeserver written in python (pypi package matrix-synapse)

Medium CVSS 5.3

Synapse is a Matrix reference homeserver written in python (pypi package matrix-synapse). Matrix is an ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP. In Synapse before version 1.33.2 "Push rules" can specify conditions under which they will match, including `event_match`, which matches event content against a pattern including wildcards. Certain patterns can cause very poor performance in the matching engine, leading to a denial-of-service when processing moderate length events. The issue is patched in version 1.33.2. A potential workaround might be to prevent users from making custom push rules, by blocking such requests at a reverse-proxy.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2021-05-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-331

Affected products

  • matrix / synapse
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 34

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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