Nimiq Core Rust Albatross Discovery Handler Underflow Vulnerability Leading to Denial-of-Service

A vulnerability in the discovery handshake process of nimiq/core-rs-albatross versions through 1.2.2 allows a peer to send a limit of zero, which is accepted and stored without modification. This creates a false impression of a benign session. Once the session is established, the system attempts to update the peer list based on the received limit. With a limit of zero, the calculation wraps around to the maximum value for an unsigned size, causing a deliberate panic due to a capacity overflow when the system tries to allocate space for a vector. This issue has been resolved in version 1.3.0.

Impact

Exploitation of this vulnerability causes a panic in the application due to a capacity overflow, which can lead to a denial-of-service condition by crashing the application.

Remediation

Users can upgrade to Nimiq Core Rust Albatross version 1.3.0 to address this vulnerability.