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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2020-26890 json

Denial of service attack due to invalid JSON

published 5y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-4mp3-385r-v63f , PYSEC-2020-237 , EUVD-2020-0107

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.0%
EPSS 3.0% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 87%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Matrix Synapse before 1.20.0 erroneously permits non-standard NaN, Infinity, and -Infinity JSON values in fields of m.room.member events, allowing remote attackers to execute a denial of service attack against the federation and common Matrix clients. If such a malformed event is accepted into the room's state, the impact is long-lasting and is not fixed by an upgrade to a newer version, requiring the event to be manually redacted instead. Since events are replicated to servers of other room members, the impact is not constrained to the server of the event sender.

Patch / fix

  • pypi matrix-synapse 1.20.0
  • matrix synapse 1.20.0
  • synapse Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +9 more 1.20.0-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2020-26890

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • matrix-synapse Arch Linux 1.20.1-1

arch linux advisories AVG-1296

Is CVE-2020-26890 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2020-26890 updated cvss 7.5

matrix-synapse: DoS attack due to invalid JSON

  • 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

3.00% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 87% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

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
GitHub 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
pypi matrix-synapse
<1.20.0
1.20.0

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

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.