GHSA-5653-437f-5hmc

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    GHSA-5653-437f-5hmc

    Published: 12 Apr 2022Last Modified: 8 Jul 2026

    Summary: Denial of service

    Details: The use of `String.to_atom/1` in PowAssent is susceptible to denial of service attacks. In `PowAssent.Phoenix.AuthorizationController` a value is fetched from the user provided params, and `String.to_atom/1` is used to convert the binary value to an atom so it can be used to fetch the provider configuration value. This is unsafe as it is user provided data, and can be used to fill up the whole atom table of ~1M which will cause the app to crash.

    References: https://github.com/pow-auth/pow_assent/security/advisories/GHSA-368c-xvrv-x986, https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-16764, https://github.com/pow-auth/pow_assent/commit/026105eeecc0e3c2f807e7109e745ea93c0fd9cf, https://github.com/pow-auth/pow_assent, https://hex.pm/packages/pow_assent, http://erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/commoncaveats.html#list_to_atom-1

    Affected packages

    Package

    Name: pow_assent

    Purl: pkg:hex/pow_assent

    Affected ranges

    Type: SEMVER

    Events:

    Introduced- 0
    Fixed -0.4.4

    Affected versions

    0.1.0
    0.1.0-alpha
    0.1.0-alpha.1
    0.1.0-alpha.10
    0.1.0-alpha.11
    0.1.0-alpha.12
    0.1.0-alpha.2
    0.1.0-alpha.3
    0.1.0-alpha.4
    0.1.0-alpha.5
    0.1.0-alpha.6
    0.1.0-alpha.7
    0.1.0-alpha.8
    0.1.0-alpha.9
    0.1.0-rc.0
    0.1.0-rc.1
    0.1.0-rc.2

    Common Vulnerability Scoring System

    Attack Vector
    Network
    Adjacent
    Local
    Physical
    Privileges Required
    None
    Low
    High
    User Interaction
    None
    Required
    Scope
    Unchanged
    Changed
    Confidentiality
    None
    Low
    High
    Integrity
    None
    Low
    High
    Availability
    None
    Low
    High
    GHSA-5653-437f-5hmc | CVE-DB