CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-37481 — Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform for managing data privacy requests and privacy regulations

Medium CVSS 4.9

Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform for managing data privacy requests and privacy regulations. The Fides webserver is vulnerable to a type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to upload zip files containing malicious SVG bombs (similar to a billion laughs attack), causing resource exhaustion in Admin UI browser tabs and creating a persistent denial of service of the 'new connector' page (`datastore-connection/new`). This vulnerability affects Fides versions `2.11.0` through `2.15.1`. Exploitation is limited to users with elevated privileges with the `CONNECTOR_TEMPLATE_REGISTER` scope, which includes root users and users with the owner role. The vulnerability has been patched in Fides version `2.16.0`. Users are advised to upgrade to this version or later to secure their systems against this threat. There is no known workaround to remediate this vulnerability without upgrading.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
4.9 (3.1)
Published
2023-07-18
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • ethyca / fides

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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