Denial of service (via resource exhaustion) due to improper input validation on groups/communities endpoints

Impact

Missing input validation of some parameters on the groups (also known as communities) endpoints could cause excessive use of disk space and memory leading to resource exhaustion. Additionally clients may have issues rendering large fields.

Patches

This issue is fixed by #9321 and #9393.

Workarounds

The groups feature can be disabled (by setting enable_group_creation to False) to mitigate this issue. Note that it is disabled by default.

Other information

Note that the groups feature is not part of the Matrix specification and the chosen maximum lengths are arbitrary. Not all clients might abide by them.