GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c
HIGHGHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in indy-node. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in Indy Node
Blast Radius
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Description
Summary
Indy Node has a bug in TAA handling code. The current primary can be crashed with a malformed transaction from a client, which leads to a view change. Repeated rapid view changes have the potential of bringing down the network.
Discovery
On May 18, Evernym's monitoring of Sovrin StagingNet showed a report of StagingNet losing sufficient consensus to validate write transactions. The problem resolved itself within a few minutes. On May 20th we saw the alert multiple times, and we began analyzing the logs of our steward node. On May 21st we continued to see the alerts with increasing frequency.
It appears that someone is unknowingly sending a malformed transaction, and retrying when the transaction fails. The cause of the errors appear to be the TAA acceptance.
Proposed actions
- Reproduce problem in integration tests and create a fix
- Do a hotfix release branching from last stable (current master have some things merged that are too risky)
- Upgrade BuilderNet, StagingNet and MainNet as soon as possible
- Improve testing strategy on Indy Node to reduce probability of such bugs
Notes
- The journalctl logs also show an out-of-memory problem on the Australia node. We need to evaluate if this should be raised as a separate issue.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | indy-node | ≥ 1.12.2&&< 1.12.3 | 1.12.3 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for indy-node. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update indy-node to 1.12.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-3gw4-m5w7-v89c across PyPI dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.