CVE-2023-1370: Stack exhaustion in json-smart leads to denial of service when parsing malformed JSON

Impact Affected versions of net.minidev:json-smart are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to a StackOverflowError when parsing a deeply nested JSON array or object.

When reaching a ‘[‘ or ‘{‘ character in the JSON input, the code parses an array or an object respectively. It was discovered that the 3PP does not have any limit to the nesting of such arrays or objects. Since the parsing of nested arrays and objects is done recursively, nesting too many of them can cause stack exhaustion (stack overflow) and crash the software.

Patches This vulnerability was fixed in json-smart version 2.4.9, but the maintainer recommends upgrading to 2.4.10, due to a remaining bug.

Workarounds N/A

References - https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-1370 - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-1370 - https://security.snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-NETMINIDEV-3369748

— GitHub

A flaw was found in the json-smart package. This security flaw occurs when reaching a ‘[‘ or ‘{‘ character in the JSON input, and the code parses an array or an object, respectively. The 3PP does not have any limit to the nesting of such arrays or objects. Since nested arrays and objects are parsed recursively, nesting too many of them can cause stack exhaustion (stack overflow) and crash the software.

netplex json-smart-v2 is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by not limiting the nesting of arrays or objects. By sending a specially crafted input, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a stack exhaustion and crash the software.

— IBM