CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-50269 — Squid is a caching proxy for the Web

High CVSS 8.6

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web. Due to an Uncontrolled Recursion bug in versions 2.6 through 2.7.STABLE9, versions 3.1 through 5.9, and versions 6.0.1 through 6.5, Squid may be vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack against HTTP Request parsing. This problem allows a remote client to perform Denial of Service attack by sending a large X-Forwarded-For header when the follow_x_forwarded_for feature is configured. This bug is fixed by Squid version 6.6. In addition, patches addressing this problem for the stable releases can be found in Squid's patch archives.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2023-12-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-674

Affected products

  • squid-cache / squid
  • squid-cache / squid / 2.6
  • squid-cache / squid / 2.7

Showing 3 representative product identities from 13 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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