Skip to content

Mismatch inventory transactions abuse to make the server spit out lots of data (bandwidth multiplier)

Moderate
dktapps published GHSA-42qm-8v8m-m78c May 30, 2023

Package

composer pocketmine/pocketmine-mp (Composer)

Affected versions

< 4.18.0-ALPHA2

Patched versions

4.18.0-ALPHA2

Description

Impact

A "mismatch" type InventoryTransactionPacket is sent by the client to request a resync of all currently open inventories.

Since PocketMine-MP does not rate-limit these "mismatch" transactions, and the syncing of inventories is not deferred until, e.g. the end of the current tick, they can be used as a very cheap bandwidth multiplier by making the server send out many MB of data (network serialized inventory items can be very large, especially when dealing with large amounts of NBT).

This is not currently known to have been exploited in the wild.

Patches

This problem was fixed in 4.18.0-ALPHA2 by ca6d514 alongside the introduction of the ItemStackRequest system implementation.

Workarounds

Plugins can handle DataPacketReceiveEvent for InventoryTransactionPacket and check if the type is MismatchTransactionData. If it is, apply some kind of rate limit (e.g. max 1 per tick).

Severity

Moderate
5.3
/ 10

CVSS base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

CVE ID

No known CVE

Weaknesses

No CWEs

Credits