Organizations have been warned about denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities found in RabbitMQ, EMQ X and VerneMQ, three widely used open source message brokers.
Message brokers enable applications, systems and services to communicate with each other and exchange information by translating messages between formal messaging protocols. One of the protocols they use is Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT).
A researcher at the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center discovered that specially crafted MQTT messages can cause excessive memory consumption in RabbitMQ (owned by VMware), EMQ X and VerneMQ, leading to the operating system terminating the application.
A type of malformed message that causes a DoS condition has been identified for each of the three message brokers, but there does not appear to be a single message that impacts all three brokers.
“Message brokers can be the nerve center of a complex system,” Jonathan Knudsen, the researcher who discovered the flaws, told SecurityWeek. “If the message broker isn’t working, then the various components of the system cannot communicate. Whatever services are provided by that system are unavailable until the message broker is restored.”
As for how the vulnerabilities can be exploited, Knudsen explained, “These vulnerabilities can be exploited by any system that has access to the message broker. The broker can be configured to require authentication or refuse connections from unrecognized endpoints which would limit external attacks. But for an attacker with access to one of the vulnerable message brokers, the vulnerabilities can be exploited simply by delivering a badly formed network packet, which can be done with a very simple script.”
According to EMQ, its message broker has been downloaded more than 2 million times and it has over 5,000 global enterprise users. RabbitMQ claims to have tens of thousands of users, including small startups and large enterprises. VerneMQ is used by companies such as Microsoft, Volkswagen, Siemens and Swisscom.
The vulnerabilities, rated high severity, are tracked as CVE-2021-22116 (RabbitMQ), CVE-2021-33175 (EMQ X) and CVE-2021-33176 (VerneMQ). They were patched in April, March and May, respectively.
Related: Use of SCPI Protocol Exposes Measurement Instruments to Attacks
Related: PoC Exploit Released for Wormable Windows Vulnerability
Related: NTLM Relay Attack Abuses Windows RPC Protocol Vulnerability
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Organizations Warned of Backdoor Feature in Hundreds of Gigabyte Motherboards
- Barracuda Zero-Day Exploited to Deliver Malware for Months Before Discovery
- Industrial Giant ABB Confirms Ransomware Attack, Data Theft
- Zyxel Firewalls Hacked by Mirai Botnet
- New Russia-Linked CosmicEnergy ICS Malware Could Disrupt Electric Grids
- Drop in Insider Breaches Drives Decline in Intrusions at OT Organizations
- Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited to Hack Barracuda Email Security Gateway Appliances
- OAuth Vulnerabilities in Widely Used Expo Framework Allowed Account Takeovers
Latest News
- Chrome 114 Released With 18 Security Fixes
- Organizations Warned of Backdoor Feature in Hundreds of Gigabyte Motherboards
- Breaking Enterprise Silos and Improving Protection
- Spyware Found in Google Play Apps With Over 420 Million Downloads
- Millions of WordPress Sites Patched Against Critical Jetpack Vulnerability
- Barracuda Zero-Day Exploited to Deliver Malware for Months Before Discovery
- PyPI Enforcing 2FA for All Project Maintainers to Boost Security
- Personal Information of 9 Million Individuals Stolen in MCNA Ransomware Attack
