CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-34450 — CometBFT is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine and replicates it on many machines

Medium CVSS 5.3

CometBFT is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine and replicates it on many machines. An internal modification made in versions 0.34.28 and 0.37.1 to the way struct `PeerState` is serialized to JSON introduced a deadlock when new function MarshallJSON is called. This function can be called from two places. The first is via logs, setting the `consensus` logging module to "debug" level (should not happen in production), and setting the log output format to JSON. The second is via RPC `dump_consensus_state`. Case 1, which should not be hit in production, will eventually hit the deadlock in most goroutines, effectively halting the node. In case 2, only the data structures related to the first peer will be deadlocked, together with the thread(s) dealing with the RPC request(s). This means that only one of the channels of communication to the node's peers will be blocked. Eventually the peer will timeout and excluded from the list (typically after 2 minutes). The goroutines involved in the deadlock will not be garbage collected, but they will not interfere with the system after the peer is excluded. The theoretical worst case for case 2, is a…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2023-07-03
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-401, CWE-770

Affected products

  • cometbft / cometbft

Showing 1 representative product identities from 2 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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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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