CVE-2020-5303

Denial of service in Tendermint

LOW
3.7
CVSS Score
Published: April 10, 2020 at 06:30 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 03:21 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorTendermint

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Severity
LOW3.7
Exploit prediction
EPSS 1%

Description

Tendermint before versions 0.33.3, 0.32.10, and 0.31.12 has a denial-of-service vulnerability. Tendermint does not limit the number of P2P connection requests. For each p2p connection, it allocates XXX bytes. Even though this memory is garbage collected once the connection is terminated (due to duplicate IP or reaching a maximum number of inbound peers), temporary memory spikes can lead to OOM (Out-Of-Memory) exceptions. Additionally, Tendermint does not reclaim activeID of a peer after it's removed in Mempool reactor. This does not happen all the time. It only happens when a connection fails (for any reason) before the Peer is created and added to all reactors. RemovePeer is therefore called before AddPeer, which leads to always growing memory (activeIDs map). The activeIDs map has a maximum size of 65535 and the node will panic if this map reaches the maximum. An attacker can create a lot of connection attempts (exploiting above denial of service), which ultimately will lead to the node panicking. These issues are patched in Tendermint 0.33.3 and 0.32.10.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 0.31.12v < 0.32.10v < 0.33.30.32.0 ≤ v < 0.32.100.33.0 ≤ v < 0.33.3
Affected range stops below 0.31.12, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 0.32.10, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 0.33.3, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

References (3)

CVSS

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
HIGH
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
LOW
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-789CWE-787

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