Vitess vulnerable to infinite memory consumption and vtgate crash
Medium4.9CVE-2024-32886 · Published May 8, 2024 · updated Sep 10, 2026
Affected versions
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| github.com/vitessio/vitess Go | >= 19.0.0, < 19.0.4 | 19.0.4 |
| >= 18.0.0, < 18.0.5 | 18.0.5 | |
| < 17.0.7 | 17.0.7 | |
| vitess.io/vitess Go | < 0.17.7 | 0.17.7 |
| >= 0.18.0, < 0.18.5 | 0.18.5 | |
| >= 0.19.0, < 0.19.4 | 0.19.4 |
Details and references
### Summary When executing the following simple query, the `vtgate` will go into an endless loop that also keeps consuming memory and eventually will OOM. ### Details When running the following query, the `evalengine` will try evaluate it and runs forever. ``` select _utf16 0xFF ``` The source of the bug lies in the collation logic that we have. The bug applies to all `utf16`, `utf32` and `ucs2` encodings. In general, the bug is there for any encoding where the minimal byte length for a single character is more than 1 byte. The decoding functions for these collations all implement logic like the following to enforce the minimal character length: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/blob/8f6cfaaa643a08dc111395a75a2d250ee746cfa8/go/mysql/collations/charset/unicode/utf16.go#L69-L71 The problem is that all the callers of `DecodeRune` expect progress by returning the number of bytes consumed. This means that if there's only 1 byte left in an input, it will here return still `0` and the caller(s) don't consume the character. One example of such a caller is the following: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/blob/8f6cfaaa643a08dc111395a75a2d250ee746cfa8/go/mysql/collations/charset/convert.go#L73-L79 The logic here moves forward the pointer in the input `[]byte` but if `DecodeRune` returns `0` in case of error, it will keep running forever. The OOM happens since it keeps adding the `?` as the invalid character to the destination buffer infinitely, growing forever until it runs out of memory. The fix here would be to always return forward progress also on invalid strings. There's also a separate bug here that even if progress is guaranteed, `select _utf16 0xFF` will return the wrong result currently. MySQL will pad here the input when the `_utf16` introducer is used with leading `0x00` bytes and then decode to UTF-16, resulting in the output of `ÿ` here. ### PoC ``` select _utf16 0xFF ``` ### Impact Denial of service attack by triggering unbounded memory usage.
- CVSS 3.1
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Severity from
- GitHub (reviewed advisory)
- Weakness
- CWE-835
- Also known as
- CVE-2024-32886, GO-2024-2826
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/security/advisories/GHSA-649x-hxfx-57j2
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-32886
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/commit/2fd5ba1dbf6e9b32fdfdaf869d130066b1b5c0df
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/commit/9df4b66550e46b5d7079e21ed0e1b0f49f92b055
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/commit/c46dc5b6a4329a10589ca928392218d96031ac8d
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/commit/d438adf7e34a6cf00fe441db80842ec669a99202
- github.com/vitessio/vitess
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/blob/8f6cfaaa643a08dc111395a75a2d250ee746cfa8/go/mysql/collations/charset/convert.go#L73-L79
- github.com/vitessio/vitess/blob/8f6cfaaa643a08dc111395a75a2d250ee746cfa8/go/mysql/collations/charset/unicode/utf16.go#L69-L71
More vitess advisories
All| Date | Advisory | Severity | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 32024 | Vitess allows HTML injection in /debug/querylogz & /debug/env CVE-2024-53257Medium4.9fixed in 0.19.8, 0.20.4, 0.21.1 | Medium4.9 | 0.19.8, 0.20.4, 0.21.1 |
| May 112023 | VTAdmin users that can create shards can deny access to other functions CVE-2023-29195Medium4.1fixed in 0.16.2 | Medium4.1 | 0.16.2 |
| Apr 112023 | vitess allows users to create keyspaces that can deny access to already existing keyspaces CVE-2023-29194Medium4.1fixed in 0.16.1 | Medium4.1 | 0.16.1 |
| Feb 26 | Vitess users with backup storage access can gain unauthorized access to production deployment environments CVE-2026-27965Highno fix yet | High | No fix yet |
| Feb 27 | Vitess users with backup storage access can write to arbitrary file paths on restore CVE-2026-27969Criticalfixed in 0.22.4, 0.23.3 | Critical | 0.22.4, 0.23.3 |
| Aug 18 | Vitess: Missing authorization on vttablet /debug/vrlog exposes live VReplication SQL data CVE-2026-65959Medium5.3no fix yet | Medium5.3 | No fix yet |