CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-27483 — crossplane-runtime is a set of go libraries used to build Kubernetes controllers in Crossplane and its related stacks

High CVSS 7.5

crossplane-runtime is a set of go libraries used to build Kubernetes controllers in Crossplane and its related stacks. An out of memory panic vulnerability has been discovered in affected versions. Applications that use the `Paved` type's `SetValue` method with user provided input without proper validation might use excessive amounts of memory and cause an out of memory panic. In the fieldpath package, the Paved.SetValue method sets a value on the Paved object according to the provided path, without any validation. This allows setting values in slices at any provided index, which grows the target array up to the requested index, the index is currently capped at max uint32 (4294967295) given how indexes are parsed, but that is still an unnecessarily large value. If callers are not validating paths' indexes on their own, which most probably are not going to do, given that the input is parsed directly in the SetValue method, this could allow users to consume arbitrary amounts of memory. Applications that do not use the `Paved` type's `SetValue` method are not affected. This issue has been addressed in versions 0.16.1 and 0.19.2. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade c…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-03-09
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20, CWE-400

Affected products

  • crossplane / crossplane-runtime
  • crossplane / crossplane-runtime / 0.16.0

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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