CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-31052 — Synapse is an open source home server implementation for the Matrix chat network

Medium CVSS 6.5

Synapse is an open source home server implementation for the Matrix chat network. In versions prior to 1.61.1 URL previews of some web pages can exhaust the available stack space for the Synapse process due to unbounded recursion. This is sometimes recoverable and leads to an error for the request causing the problem, but in other cases the Synapse process may crash altogether. It is possible to exploit this maliciously, either by malicious users on the homeserver, or by remote users sending URLs that a local user's client may automatically request a URL preview for. Remote users are not able to exploit this directly, because the URL preview endpoint is authenticated. Deployments with `url_preview_enabled: false` set in configuration are not affected. Deployments with `url_preview_enabled: true` set in configuration **are** affected. Deployments with no configuration value set for `url_preview_enabled` are not affected, because the default is `false`. Administrators of homeservers with URL previews enabled are advised to upgrade to v1.61.1 or higher. Users unable to upgrade should set `url_preview_enabled` to false.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-06-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-674

Affected products

  • matrix / synapse
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 35
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 36

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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