CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-37475 — Hamba avro is a go lang encoder/decoder implementation of the avro codec specification

High CVSS 7.5

Hamba avro is a go lang encoder/decoder implementation of the avro codec specification. In affected versions a well-crafted string passed to avro's `github.com/hamba/avro/v2.Unmarshal()` can throw a `fatal error: runtime: out of memory` which is unrecoverable and can cause denial of service of the consumer of avro. The root cause of the issue is that avro uses part of the input to `Unmarshal()` to determine the size when creating a new slice and hence an attacker may consume arbitrary amounts of memory which in turn may cause the application to crash. This issue has been addressed in commit `b4a402f4` which has been included in release version `2.13.0`. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-07-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • avro_project / avro

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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