CVE-2023-40583

libp2p nodes vulnerable to OOM attack

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: August 25, 2023 at 08:25 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 06:18 AM UTC
2 products affected across 2 vendorsLIBP2PGo LIBP2P

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 1.0%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

libp2p is a networking stack and library modularized out of The IPFS Project, and bundled separately for other tools to use. In go-libp2p, by using signed peer records a malicious actor can store an arbitrary amount of data in a remote node’s memory. This memory does not get garbage collected and so the victim can run out of memory and crash. If users of go-libp2p in production are not monitoring memory consumption over time, it could be a silent attack i.e. the attacker could bring down nodes over a period of time (how long depends on the node resources i.e. a go-libp2p node on a virtual server with 4 gb of memory takes about 90 sec to bring down; on a larger server, it might take a bit longer.) This issue was patched in version 0.27.4.

Affected

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

v < 0.27.4
Affected range stops below 0.27.4, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
v < 0.27.4
Affected range stops below 0.27.4, 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:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

7.5HIGHGitHub_M
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-400NVD-CWE-noinfo

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