Denial of service of Minder Server from maliciously crafted GitHub attestations

published 2024-05-27 2 y ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also EUVD-2024-1522 , GHSA-8fmj-33gw-g7pw , GO-2024-2885

cvss: 5.3; version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.5%; EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 45%
public exploits: 0; none known

Minder by Stacklok is an open source software supply chain security platform. Minder prior to version 0.0.51 is vulnerable to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack which could allow an attacker to crash the Minder server and deny other users access to it. The root cause of the vulnerability is that Minders sigstore verifier reads an untrusted response entirely into memory without enforcing a limit on the response body. An attacker can exploit this by making Minder make a request to an attacker-controlled endpoint which returns a response with a large body which will crash the Minder server. Specifically, the point of failure is where Minder parses the response from the GitHub attestations endpoint in `getAttestationReply`. Here, Minder makes a request to the `orgs/$owner/attestations/$checksumref` GitHub endpoint (line 285) and then parses the response into the `AttestationReply` (line 295). The way Minder parses the response on line 295 makes it prone to DoS if the response is large enough. Essentially, the response needs to be larger than the machine has available memory. Version 0.0.51 contains a patch for this issue.

The content that is hosted at the `orgs/$owner/attestations/$checksumref` GitHub attestation endpoint is controlled by users including unauthenticated users to Minders threat model. However, a user will need to configure their own Minder settings to cause Minder to make Minder send a request to fetch the attestations. The user would need to know of a package whose attestations were configured in such a way that they would return a large response when fetching them. As such, the steps needed to carry out this attack would look as such:

1. The attacker adds a package to ghcr.io with attestations that can be fetched via the `orgs/$owner/attestations/$checksumref` GitHub endpoint. 2. The attacker registers on Minder and makes Minder fetch the attestations. 3. Minder fetches attestations and crashes thereby being denied of service.

Patch / fix

fixed in 3 links 1

go github.com/stacklok/minder 0.0.51
lfprojects minder 0.0.51
stacklok minder 0.0.51

github.com/stacklok/minder@fe321d3 commit

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical impact: partial
Assessed: 2 y ago (2024-08-06)

Exploit prediction

0.53% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 45% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	3.1	5.3	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
GitHub	3.1	5.3	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem	package	affected	fixed in
go	github.com/stacklok/minder	<0.0.51	0.0.51

Affected products

stacklok minder

Classification

Weakness

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.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.

Summary