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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.3

CVE-2021-21274 json

Denial of service attack via .well-known lookups

published 2021-02-26 5 y ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-2hwx-mjrm-v3g8 , PYSEC-2021-132 , EUVD-2021-0124

cvss
4.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
2.2%
EPSS 2.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 82%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Synapse is a Matrix reference homeserver written in python (pypi package matrix-synapse). Matrix is an ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP. In Synapse before version 1.25.0, a malicious homeserver could redirect requests to their .well-known file to a large file. This can lead to a denial of service attack where homeservers will consume significantly more resources when requesting the .well-known file of a malicious homeserver. This affects any server which accepts federation requests from untrusted servers. Issue is resolved in version 1.25.0. As a workaround the `federation_domain_whitelist` setting can be used to restrict the homeservers communicated with over federation.

Patch / fix

  • pypi matrix-synapse 1.25.0
  • matrix synapse 1.25.0

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-2021-21274 updated cvss 4.3

matrix-synapse: DoS via .well-known lookups

  • 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

2.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 82% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 4.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.1 4.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi matrix-synapse
>=0.99.0, <1.25.0
1.25.0

Affected products

  • matrix-org synapse

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns 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.