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
- 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.
Affected software
| Software | Affected versions |
|---|---|
TraefikServers and applications · github:traefik/traefik |
|
References
- GitHub Advisory Database https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-rr42-h8r2-f28g
- github.com https://github.com/traefik/traefik/security/advisories/GHSA-rr42-h8r2-f28g