libp2p nodes vulnerable to OOM attack

Vulnerability Description

libp2p is a networking stack and library modularized out of The IPFS Project, and bundled separately for other tools to use. In go-libp2p, by using signed peer records a malicious actor can store an arbitrary amount of data in a remote node’s memory. This memory does not get garbage collected and so the victim can run out of memory and crash. If users of go-libp2p in production are not monitoring memory consumption over time, it could be a silent attack i.e. the attacker could bring down nodes over a period of time (how long depends on the node resources i.e. a go-libp2p node on a virtual server with 4 gb of memory takes about 90 sec to bring down; on a larger server, it might take a bit longer.) This issue was patched in version 0.27.4.

References

• https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/security/advisories/GHSA-gcq9-qqwx-rgj3
• https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/commit/45d3c6fff662ddd6938982e7e9309ad5fa2ad8dd
• https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/releases/tag/v0.27.4
• https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/releases/tag/v0.27.7