Home/CVE/The Candid library causes a Denial of Service while parsing a specially crafted payload with 'empty' data type. For exa
CVE

CVE-2023-6245

The Candid library causes a Denial of Service while parsing a specially crafted payload with 'empty' data type. For exa

The Candid library causes a Denial of Service while parsing a specially crafted payload with 'empty' data type. For example, if the payload is `record { *.

empty } and the canister interface expects record { * }` then the Rust candid decoder treats empty as an extra field required by the type. The problem with the type empty is that the candid Rust library wrongly categorizes empty as a recoverable error when skipping the field and thus causing an infinite decoding loop. Canisters using affected versions of candid are exposed to denial of service by causing the decoding to run indefinitely until the canister traps due to reaching maximum instruction limit per execution round. Repeated exposure to the payload will result in degraded performance of the canister. Note: Canisters written in Motoko are unaffected.

HIGH · CVSS 7.5 EPSS 0.00131
Schedule remediation
  • SSVC automatable: yes - attacks can be scripted at scale
  • CVSS base score ≥ 7.0
Sigma rules0 YARA rules0

Affected Products & Versions

1
dfinity candid>= 0.9.0 and < 0.9.10

Affected Packages

1
Language-ecosystem packages (from OSV) tied to this CVE, with the version that fixes it - the dependency-level detail NVD doesn’t carry.
crates.io candid HIGH fixed in 0.9.10

Scoring & Timeline

7.5
HIGH · CVSS v3.1 · 6b35d637-e00f-4228-858c-b20ad6e1d07b
View on NVD
Attack Vector
Network Adjacent Local Physical
Attack Complexity
Low High
Privileges Required
None Low High
User Interaction
None Required
Scope
Unchanged Changed
Confidentiality
None Low High
Integrity
None Low High
Availability
None Low High
Published to NVD08 Dec 2023 · 03:15 PM
CVSS VectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
SSVC triage · cisa-vulnrichment
Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
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