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GHSA-4h45-jpvh-6p5j CVE-2024-58259 GO-2025-3923

Rancher affected by unauthenticated Denial of Service

High Go
Severity
8.2 / 10
High · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS)
0.52%
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 44.26% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited
No
Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness
CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Fix
2.12.1
Upgrade github.com/rancher/rancher to this version or later

Description

Impact

A vulnerability has been identified within Rancher Manager in which it did not enforce request body size limits on certain public (unauthenticated) and authenticated API endpoints. This allows a malicious user to exploit this by sending excessively large payloads, which are fully loaded into memory during processing. This could result in:

  • Denial of Service (DoS): The server process may crash or become unresponsive when memory consumption exceeds available resources.
  • Unauthenticated and authenticated exploitation: While the issue was initially observed in unauthenticated /v3-public/* endpoints, the absence of request body size limits also affected several authenticated APIs, broadening the potential attack surface. It's worth noting that other areas in Rancher do implement safeguards: requests proxied to Kubernetes APIs are subject to built-in size limits enforced by the Kubernetes API server itself, and Norman-based endpoints parse input with predefined size caps. However, the absence of similar protections in other Rancher APIs increased the risk of denial-of-service (DoS) scenarios in certain contexts.

By sending large binary or text payloads to vulnerable endpoints, a malicious actor could disrupt Rancher’s availability, impacting both administrative and user operations across managed clusters.

Please consult the associated MITRE ATT&CK - Technique - Network Denial of Service for further information about this category of attack.

Patches

This vulnerability is addressed by adding a default limit of 1MiB and a setting in case this value needs to be increased.

Patched versions of Rancher include releases v2.12.1, v2.11.5, v2.10.9 and v2.9.12.

Workarounds

If you can't upgrade to a fixed version, please make sure that you are manually setting the request body size limits. For example, using nginx-ingress controller and only allowing requests via the ingress. For reference on how to configure the limit manually, please consult the Knowledge Base.

References

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

Affected versions

Go

PackageVulnerableFixed in
github.com/rancher/rancher
>= 2.12.0, < 2.12.1
2.12.1
github.com/rancher/rancher
>= 2.11.0, < 2.11.5
2.11.5
github.com/rancher/rancher
>= 2.10.0, < 2.10.9
2.10.9
github.com/rancher/rancher
>= 2.9.0, < 2.9.11
2.9.11
github.com/rancher/rancher
< 0.0.0-20250813072957-aee95d4e2a41
0.0.0-20250813072957-aee95d4e2a41

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

github.com/rancher/rancher Go → 2.12.1

go
go get github.com/rancher/rancher@v2.12.1 && go mod tidy

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 8.2

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
High

Weakness

CWE-770: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

The product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any intended restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated.

How to prevent it
  • Requirements: Clearly specify the minimum and maximum expectations for capabilities, and dictate which behaviors are acceptable when resource allocation reaches limits.
  • Architecture and Design: Limit the amount of resources that are accessible to unprivileged users. Set per-user limits for resources. Allow the system administrator to define these limits. Be careful to avoid CWE-410.
  • Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place, and it will help the administrator to identify who is committing the abuse. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
  • Implementation: Assume all input is malicious. Use an "accept known good" input validation strategy, i.e., use a list of acceptable inputs that strictly conform to specifications. Reject any input that does not strictly conform to specifications, or transform it into something that does. When performing input validation, consider all potentially relevant properties, including length, type of input, the full range of acceptable values, missing or extra inputs, syntax, consistency across related fields, and conformance to business rules. As an example of business rule logic, "boat" may be syntactically valid because it only contains alphanumeric characters, but it is not valid if the input is only expected to contain colors such as "red" or "blue." Do not rely exclusively on looking for malicious or malformed inputs. This is likely to miss at least one undesirable input, especially if the code's environment changes. This can give attackers enough room to bypass the intended validation. However, denylists can be useful for detecting potential attacks or determining which inputs are so malformed that they should be rejected outright.
  • Architecture and Design: For any security checks that are performed on the client side, ensure that these checks are duplicated on the server side, in order to avoid CWE-602. Attackers can bypass the client-side checks by modifying values after the checks have been performed, or by changing the client to remove the client-side checks entirely. Then, these modified values would be submitted to the server.
  • Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, typically by using increasing time delays uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution can be difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply requires more resources on the part of the attacker.
  • Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
  • Architecture and Design, Implementation: If the program must fail, ensure that it fails gracefully (fails closed). There may be a temptation to simply let the program fail poorly in cases such as low memory conditions, but an attacker may be able to assert control before the software has fully exited. Alternately, an uncontrolled failure could cause cascading problems with other downstream components; for example, the program could send a signal to a downstream process so the process immediately knows that a problem has occurred and has a better chance of recovery. Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.
  • Operation, Architecture and Design: Use quotas or other resource-limiting settings provided by the operating system or environment. For example, when managing system resources in POSIX, setrlimit() can be used to set limits for certain types of resources, and getrlimit() can determine how many resources are available. However, these functions are not available on all operating systems. When the current levels get close to the maximum that is defined for the application (see CWE-770), then limit the allocation of further resources to privileged users; alternately, begin releasing resources for less-privileged users. While this mitigation may protect the system from attack, it will not necessarily stop attackers from adversely impacting other users. Ensure that the application performs the appropriate error checks and error handling in case resources become unavailable (CWE-703).

References

Packages

Other links

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. Last updated by the source
  3. Latest EPSS score
AdvisorySeverityWhy it's related
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GHSA-hwm2-4ph6-w6m5
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High Also affects github.com/rancher/rancher
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GHSA-mw39-9qc2-f7mg
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Medium Also affects github.com/rancher/rancher
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