CVE-2023-40583 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p. A fix is available for github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p — see the affected versions and patch details below.
libp2p nodes vulnerable to OOM attack
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-2023-40583.
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
github.com/libp2p/go-libp2pReal-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
Summary
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.
It is feasible to do this at scale. An attacker would have to transfer ~1/2 as much memory it wants to occupy (2x amplification factor).
The attacker can perform this attack over time as the target node’s memory will not be garbage collected.
This can occur because when a signed peer record is received, only the signature validity check is performed but the sender signature is not checked. Signed peer records from randomly generated peers can be sent by a malicious actor. A target node will accept the peer record as long as the signature is valid, and then stored in the peer store.
There is cleanup logic in the peer store that cleans up data when a peer disconnects, but this cleanup is never triggered for the fake peer (from which signed peer records were accepted) because it was never “connected”.
Impact
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.)
Patches
Update your go-libp2p dependency to the latest release, v0.30.0 at the time of writing.
If you'd like to stay on the 0.27.x release, we strongly recommend users to update to go-libp2p 0.27.7. Though this OOM issue was fixed in 0.27.4, there were subsequent patch releases afterwards (important fixes for other issues unrelated to the OOM).
Workarounds
None
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p | all versions | 0.27.4go get github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p@v0.27.4 |
Affected Products
libp2pprotocolDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p to 0.27.4 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-40583 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-40583 in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.