Security Bulletin: Vunerablities in Netty affect watsonx.data

Summary

Netty is vulnerable to denial of service attacks. For CVE-2021-37136, the Netty Bzip2 decompression decoder function doesn’t allow setting size restrictions on the decompressed output data which affects the allocation size used during decompression. A malicious input can trigger an Out Of Memory Error causing a denial of service condition in watsonx.data when reading a bzip2. For CVE-2021-37137m the Neety Snappy frame decoder function does not restrict the chunk length which may lead to excessive memory usage. Additionally, it may buffer reserved skippable chunks until the whole chunk was received which may lead to excessive memory usage. This vulnerability can be triggered by supplying malicious input that decompresses to a very big size (via a network stream or a file) or by sending a huge skippable chunk. This can be exploited in watsonx.data when using snappy for compression.

Vulnerability Details

CVEID:CVE-2021-37136
**DESCRIPTION:**Netty netty-codec is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by not allow size restrictions for decompressed data in the Bzip2Decoder. By sending a specially-crafted input, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial of service condition.
CVSS Base score: 7.5
CVSS Temporal Score: See: https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/211777 for the current score.
CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H)

CVEID:CVE-2021-37137
**DESCRIPTION:**Netty netty-codec is vulnerable to a denial of service, caused by not restrict the chunk length in the SnappyFrameDecoder. By sending a specially-crafted input, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause excessive memory usage, and results in a denial of service condition.
CVSS Base score: 7.5
CVSS Temporal Score: See: https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/211779 for the current score.
CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H)

Affected Products and Versions

Remediation/Fixes

The product needs to be installed or upgraded to the latest available level watsonx.data 2.0.2 or watsonx.data on CPD 5.0.2. Installation/upgrade instructions can be found here: <https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx/watsonxdata/2.0.x?topic=deployment-installing&gt;

Workarounds and Mitigations

None