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CVE-2020-26257

Denial of service attack via incorrect parameters to federation APIs

CVSS 6.5 MEDIUMEPSS 2.4%CWE-400CWE-79
In short

A malicious server can send malformed data to a Matrix homeserver by providing incorrect room identifiers in federation requests, causing the server to stop properly delivering messages to other servers in the network.

Technical detail

The vulnerability exists in Synapse's federation API endpoints (/send_join, /send_leave, /invite, /exchange_third_party_invite) which fail to validate that the room ID in the request path matches the room ID in the event payload, allowing an attacker to inject events into unintended rooms and disrupt federation message routing.

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
Matrix is an ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP. Synapse is a reference "homeserver" implementation of Matrix. A malicious or poorly-implemented homeserver can inject malformed events into a room by specifying a different room id in the path of a `/send_join`, `/send_leave`, `/invite` or `/exchange_third_party_invite` request. This can lead to a denial of service in which future events will not be correctly sent to other servers over federation. This affects any server which accepts federation requests from untrusted servers. The Matrix Synapse reference implementation before version 1.23.1 the implementation is vulnerable to this injection attack. Issue is fixed in version 1.23.1. As a workaround homeserver administrators could limit access to the federation API to trusted servers (for example via `federation_domain_whitelist`).
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
matrix-org · synapse

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