CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-36403 — Matrix Media Repo (MMR) is a highly configurable multi-homeserver media repository for Matrix

High CVSS 7.5

Matrix Media Repo (MMR) is a highly configurable multi-homeserver media repository for Matrix. MMR before version 1.3.5 is vulnerable to unbounded disk consumption, where an unauthenticated adversary can induce it to download and cache large amounts of remote media files. MMR's typical operating environment uses S3-like storage as a backend, with file-backed store as an alternative option. Instances using a file-backed store or those which self-host an S3 storage system are therefore vulnerable to a disk fill attack. Once the disk is full, authenticated users will be unable to upload new media, resulting in denial of service. For instances configured to use a cloud-based S3 storage option, this could result in high service fees instead of a denial of service. MMR 1.3.5 introduces a new default-on "leaky bucket" rate limit to reduce the amount of data a user can request at a time. This does not fully address the issue, but does limit an unauthenticated user's ability to request large amounts of data. Operators should note that the leaky bucket implementation introduced in MMR 1.3.5 requires the IP address associated with the request to be forwarded, to avoid mistakenly applying the…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-01-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • t2bot / matrix-media-repo

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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