SurrealDB has an Uncaught Exception Handling Parsing Errors on Empty Strings

The error rendering code from the parser would panic when handling failed parsing of queries where the error occurred when converting an empty string to a SurrealDB value. This would be the case when casting an empty string to a record, duration or datetime, as well as potentially when parsing an empty string to JSON or providing an empty string to the type::field and type::fields functions.

Impact

A client that is authorized to run queries in a SurrealDB server would be able to execute a malformed query which would fail to parse when converting an empty string and cause a panic in the error rendering code. This would crash the server, leading to denial of service.

Patches

• Version 2.0.4 and later are not affected by this issue.

Workarounds

Affected users who are unable to update may want to limit the ability of untrusted clients to run arbitrary SurrealQL queries in the affected versions of SurrealDB. To limit the impact of the denial of service, SurrealDB administrators may also want to ensure that the SurrealDB process is running so that it can be automatically re-started after a crash.