Uncontrolled recursion in the ASN.1 parser (Asn1InputStream, Asn1StreamParser) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc

Overview

Uncontrolled recursion in the ASN.1 parser (Asn1InputStream, Asn1StreamParser) in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. bc-csharp before 2.7.0 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted ASN.1 encoding of deeply nested constructed elements (for example SEQUENCE inside SEQUENCE, in definite-length DER or indefinite-length BER form), because each nesting level is parsed by a further recursive call with no bound on depth. About 2,000 levels (8 KB of DER) are enough to exhaust a 1.5 MB thread stack, the .NET main-thread default on Windows, and raise a StackOverflowException, which .NET cannot catch and which terminates the whole process; on threads with larger stacks, parse time instead grows quadratically with depth (about 9 seconds of CPU for a 64 KB input). Any path that parses untrusted ASN.1 is exposed, including X.509 certificates and CRLs, CMS/PKCS#7, PKCS#8/PKCS#12, OCSP and TLS Certificate messages.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.