CVE-2016-4423: Large username storage in session

Affected Versions

Symfony 2.3.0 to 2.3.40, 2.7.0 to 2.7.12, 2.8.0 to 2.8.5, and 3.0.0 to 3.0.5 versions of the Security component are affected by this security issue when using the username/password form authentication listener (and its simpler version SimpleFormAuthenticationListener).

This issue has been fixed in Symfony 2.3.41, 2.7.13, 2.8.6, and 3.0.6.

Note that no fixes are provided for Symfony 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 as they are not maintained anymore.

Description

When an authentication form is submitted by the user and if the user does not exist, the submitted username is stored in the session. If an attacker submit multiple requests with large usernames, he can potentially fill up the session storage.

Resolution

The fix consists in limiting the size of the usernames accepted by the form. To avoid any BC break, the limit is set to 4096 characters, which should be more than enough for normal usages.

The patch for this issue is available here.

Credits

I would like to thank Marek Alaksa of Citadelo for reporting this security issue. Thanks to Fabien Potencier for writing the fix for the various Symfony versions.

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Published in #Security Advisories