Go-Ethereum vulnerable to denial of service via malicious p2p message

Impact

A vulnerable node, can be made to consume unbounded amounts of memory when handling specially crafted p2p messages sent from an attacker node.

Details

The p2p handler spawned a new goroutine to respond to ping requests. By flooding a node with ping requests, an unbounded number of goroutines can be created, leading to resource exhaustion and potentially crash due to OOM.

Patches

The fix is included in geth version 1.12.1-stable, i.e, 1.12.2-unstable and onwards.

Fixed by https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/27887

Workarounds

No known workarounds.

Credits

This bug was reported by Patrick McHardy and reported via bounty@ethereum.org.

References