All vulnerabilities

Servers and applications

GHSA-rr42-h8r2-f28g

Unbounded BasicAuth password length gives ~1857x CPU amplification through MD5-crypt, pre-authentication

Severity
Medium 6.3
Published
12 Nov 2026
Last changed
12 Nov 2026
Added to UpHeron
12 Nov 2026
Fixed in
2.11.62, 3.7.18, 3.8.0-rc.2
Weakness
Allocation without limits (CWE-770)
Attack
Over the network · Only under certain conditions · No login needed · No user action needed
Attacker can
Slow it down
CVSS vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Sources
Project advisories (GitHub)

Description

There is a potential vulnerability in Traefik's BasicAuth middleware. The middleware does not limit the length of the password before it hashes it, and the MD5-crypt hash formats ($apr1$, $1$) take more CPU time as the password gets longer. An unauthenticated attacker can send requests with passwords up to the entry point maxHeaderBytes limit (1 MiB by default) and use a large amount of CPU on each request, which degrades the availability of Traefik. The patched versions reject passwords longer than 1024 bytes.

From traefik/traefik's security advisory.

Affected software

SoftwareAffected versions
TraefikServers and applications · github:traefik/traefik
  • Every version before 2.11.62
  • From 3.0.0 before 3.7.18
  • From 3.8.0-rc.1 before 3.8.0-rc.2

References