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Fencer Intel
low 3.1

CVE-2020-5303 json

Denial of service in Tendermint

published 6y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-v24h-pjjv-mcp6 , EUVD-2021-1191

cvss
3.1
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.4%
EPSS 1.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 72%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Tendermint before versions 0.33.3, 0.32.10, and 0.31.12 has a denial-of-service vulnerability. Tendermint does not limit the number of P2P connection requests. For each p2p connection, it allocates XXX bytes. Even though this memory is garbage collected once the connection is terminated (due to duplicate IP or reaching a maximum number of inbound peers), temporary memory spikes can lead to OOM (Out-Of-Memory) exceptions. Additionally, Tendermint does not reclaim activeID of a peer after it's removed in Mempool reactor. This does not happen all the time. It only happens when a connection fails (for any reason) before the Peer is created and added to all reactors. RemovePeer is therefore called before AddPeer, which leads to always growing memory (activeIDs map). The activeIDs map has a maximum size of 65535 and the node will panic if this map reaches the maximum. An attacker can create a lot of connection attempts (exploiting above denial of service), which ultimately will lead to the node panicking. These issues are patched in Tendermint 0.33.3 and 0.32.10.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/tendermint/tendermint 0.31.12, 0.32.10, 0.33.3
  • tendermint tendermint 0.31.12, 0.32.10, 0.33.3

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Exploit prediction

1.37% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 72% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 3.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 3.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/tendermint/tendermint
>=0.33.0, <0.33.3
<0.31.12
>=0.32.0, <0.32.10
0.33.3
0.31.12
0.32.10

Affected products

  • Tendermint Tendermint

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-789 Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value
  • CWE-787 Out-of-bounds Write

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.