CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-34455 — snappy-java is a fast compressor/decompressor for Java

High CVSS 7.5

snappy-java is a fast compressor/decompressor for Java. Due to use of an unchecked chunk length, an unrecoverable fatal error can occur in versions prior to 1.1.10.1. The code in the function hasNextChunk in the fileSnappyInputStream.java checks if a given stream has more chunks to read. It does that by attempting to read 4 bytes. If it wasn’t possible to read the 4 bytes, the function returns false. Otherwise, if 4 bytes were available, the code treats them as the length of the next chunk. In the case that the `compressed` variable is null, a byte array is allocated with the size given by the input data. Since the code doesn’t test the legality of the `chunkSize` variable, it is possible to pass a negative number (such as 0xFFFFFFFF which is -1), which will cause the code to raise a `java.lang.NegativeArraySizeException` exception. A worse case would happen when passing a huge positive value (such as 0x7FFFFFFF), which would raise the fatal `java.lang.OutOfMemoryError` error. Version 1.1.10.1 contains a patch for this issue.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-06-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
java/maven
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • xerial / snappy-java

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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