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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2020-15598 json

Trustwave ModSecurity 3.x through 3.0.4 allows denial of service via a special request.

published 6y ago modified 4mo ago also BIT-modsecurity-2020-15598 , BIT-modsecurity2-2020-15598 , EUVD-2020-7585

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.9%
EPSS 2.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 87%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Trustwave ModSecurity 3.x through 3.0.4 allows denial of service via a special request. NOTE: The discoverer reports "Trustwave has signaled they are disputing our claims." The CVE suggests that there is a security issue with how ModSecurity handles regular expressions that can result in a Denial of Service condition. The vendor does not consider this as a security issue because1) there is no default configuration issue here. An attacker would need to know that a rule using a potentially problematic regular expression was in place, 2) the attacker would need to know the basic nature of the regular expression itself to exploit any resource issues. It's well known that regular expression usage can be taxing on system resources regardless of the use case. It is up to the administrator to decide on when it is appropriate to trade resources for potential security benefit

Patch / fix

  • bitnami modsecurity 3.0.5
  • bitnami modsecurity2 3.0.5
  • modsecurity Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 3.0.4-2

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2020-15598

  • modsecurity Package Hub 15 SP4, openSUSE Leap 15.4 3.0.10-bp154.2.3.1
  • modsecurity Package Hub 15 SP5, openSUSE Leap 15.5 3.0.10-bp155.3.3.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2023:0269-1openSUSE-SU-2023:0257-1

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2020-15598 updated cvss 7.5

libmodsecurity: specially crafted payload could result in a DoS

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

2.92% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 87% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • coreruleset.org https://coreruleset.org/20200914/cve-2020-15598/ referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
OSV 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
bitnami modsecurity
>=3.0.0, <3.0.5
3.0.5
bitnami modsecurity2
>=3.0.0, <3.0.5
3.0.5

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-835 Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.