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Participant
December 29, 2011
Question

Hashing denial-of-service attack -- is CF vulnerable?

  • December 29, 2011
  • 4 replies
  • 1844 views

The recent announcement of major vulnerabilities in many web application platforms to a hashing DOS attack has much of the internets abuzz:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/huge-portions-of-web-vulnerable-to-hashing-denial-of-service-attack.ars

I haven't seen or heard anything regarding various versions of ColdFusion and whether it's vulnerable.

Can someone shed some light on this -- preferably someone from Adobe -- and whether a fix is forthcoming?

Thanks,

David

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

March 13, 2012

We have released a security hot-fix addressing this issue for ColdFusion 9.0.1 and earlier. More details are http://shilpikhariwal.com/2012/03/security-hot-fix-for-coldfusion-march.html

Inspiring
December 30, 2011

I can't say categorically that CF ain't affected by this, because I can't be bothered decompiling their struct implementation to see how it's been done, but I would ass-u-me that it's just a wrapper of a Java hash map (or similar), in which case it would not be vulnerable to it, because that article specifically states that Oracle have said Java is not affected by it.

It wouldn't be that hard to test & confirm one way or the other.

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Adam

Inspiring
December 30, 2011
... that article specifically states that Oracle have said Java is not affected by it.

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Adam

No, the article says java is vulnerable. Oracle just said they "decided nothing .. needs to be fixed within Java itself". Sounds more like they are saying it is the responsibility of the application server to provide a better hash implementation if needed (or choose a different method of prevention).

Inspiring
December 31, 2011

-==cfSearching==- wrote:

... that article specifically states that Oracle have said Java is not affected by it.

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Adam

No, the article says java is vulnerable. Oracle just said they "decided nothing .. needs to be fixed within Java itself". Sounds more like they are saying it is the responsibility of the application server to provide a better hash implementation if needed (or choose a different method of prevention).

Sorry, you're quite right.  I definitely misread that, didn't I! ;-)

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Adam

Community Expert
December 30, 2011

I would assume that CF is likely to be vulnerable. For ASP.NET, there's a workaround - setting a maximum limit of POST request data to around 200 characters. I suspect that workaround might also work with CF.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC
Participant
December 30, 2011

I would like to know as well.

The article doesn't specifically mention Coldfusion, but does mention Tomcat and Glassfish.

Can Adobe please release a statement about this, if CF is vulnerable, what actions are being taken to correct it, etc?

Thanks,

Carl