CVE-2023-42457 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in plone-rest. A fix is available for plone-rest — see the affected versions and patch details below.
plone.rest vulnerable to Denial of Service when ++api++ is used many times
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-2023-42457.
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
plone-rest🐍plone-restReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
plone.rest allows users to use HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. in Plone. Starting in the 2.x branch and prior to versions 2.0.1 and 3.0.1, when the ++api++ traverser is accidentally used multiple times in a url, handling it takes increasingly longer, making the server less responsive. Patches are available in plone.rest 2.0.1 and 3.0.1. Series 1.x is not affected. As a workaround, one may redirect /++api++/++api++ to /++api++ in one's frontend web server (nginx, Apache).
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | plone-rest | ≥ 2.0.0a1&&< 2.0.1 | 2.0.1pip install --upgrade 'plone-rest==2.0.1' |
| 🐍PyPI | plone-rest | ≥ 3.0.0&&< 3.0.1 | 3.0.1pip install --upgrade 'plone-rest==3.0.1' |
Affected Products
restploneDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for plone-rest, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update plone-rest to 2.0.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-42457 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-2023-42457 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.