CVE-2022-23524 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in helm.sh/helm/v3. A fix is available for helm.sh/helm/v3 — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Helm vulnerable to Denial of service through string value parsing
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-23524.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
helm.sh/helm/v3Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Fuzz testing, by Ada Logics and sponsored by the CNCF, identified input to functions in the strvals package that can cause a stack overflow. In Go, a stack overflow cannot be recovered from. Applications that use functions from the strvals package in the Helm SDK can have a Denial of Service attack when they use this package and it panics.
Impact
The strvals package contains a parser that turns strings into Go structures. For example, the Helm client has command line flags like --set, --set-string, and others that enable the user to pass in strings that are merged into the values. The strvals package converts these strings into structures Go can work with. Some string inputs can cause array data structures to be created causing a stack overflow.
Applications that use the strvals package in the Helm SDK to parse user supplied input can suffer a Denial of Service when that input causes a panic that cannot be recovered from.
The Helm Client will panic with input to --set, --set-string, and other value setting flags that causes a stack overflow. Helm is not a long running service so the panic will not affect future uses of the Helm client.
Patches
This issue has been resolved in 3.10.3.
Workarounds
SDK users can validate strings supplied by users won't create large arrays causing significant memory usage before passing them to the strvals functions.
For more information
Helm's security policy is spelled out in detail in our SECURITY document.
Credits
Disclosed by Ada Logics in a fuzzing audit sponsored by CNCF.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | helm.sh/helm/v3 | all versions | 3.10.3go get helm.sh/helm/v3@v3.10.3 |
Affected Products
helmhelmDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for helm.sh/helm/v3, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update helm.sh/helm/v3 to 3.10.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-23524 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
This moderate severity flaw was found in Helm’s strvals package, which is used for parsing string values into Go structures. The issue occurs when specially crafted input is processed, leading to excessive recursive parsing that causes a stack overflow. Since a stack overflow in Go cannot be recovered from, this…
SDK users can validate strings supplied by users that won't create large arrays causing significant memory usage before passing them to the _strvals_ functions.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2022-23524 (CC BY 4.0)
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.12 | openshift4/metallb-rhel8-operator:v4.12.0-202303301557.p0.g270d2eb.assembly.stream | RHSA-2023:1646 |
| RHACS-4.0-RHEL-8 | advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-central-db-rhel8:4.0.0-6 | RHEA-2023:2102 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-23524 in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.