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GHSA-hqxw-f8mx-cpmw

HighCVSS 7.5 / 10
Published May 11, 2023·Last modified Feb 4, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

Impact

Systems that run distribution built after a specific commit running on memory-restricted environments can suffer from denial of service by a crafted malicious /v2/_catalog API endpoint request.

Patches

Upgrade to at least 2.8.2-beta.1 if you are running v2.8.x release. If you use the code from the main branch, update at least to the commit after f55a6552b006a381d9167e328808565dd2bf77dc.

Workarounds

There is no way to work around this issue without patching. Restrict access to the affected API endpoint: see the recommendations section.

References

/v2/_catalog endpoint accepts a parameter to control the maximum amount of records returned (query string: n).

When not given the default n=100 is used. The server trusts that n has an acceptable value, however when using a maliciously large value, it allocates an array/slice of n of strings before filling the slice with data.

This behaviour was introduced ~7yrs ago [1].

Recommendation

The /v2/_catalog endpoint was designed specifically to do registry syncs with search or other API systems. Such an endpoint would create a lot of load on the backend system, due to overfetch required to serve a request in certain implementations.

Because of this, we strongly recommend keeping this API endpoint behind heightened privilege and avoiding leaving it exposed to the internet.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

[1] faulty commit

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.5

The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.

Threat Intelligence
6.9

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
N/A

Probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

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