GitHub Advisoryadvisory · crates.io

GHSA-5x78-73v4-xg6w postgres-protocol: Unbounded SCRAM iteration count allows a malicious server to cause CPU-exhaustion denial of service

HIGH Published 2026-08-24 Modified 2026-08-24 Official page ↗
Ecosystem
crates.io
Packages
postgres-protocol
Severity
High
CVSS vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Weaknesses
CWE-770
Reviewed
2026-08-24

Affected packages

• crates.io postgres-protocol: >= 0.3.0, < 0.6.12 → fixed in 0.6.12

Description

A malicious, compromised, or man-in-the-middle server can supply an arbitrarily large SCRAM-SHA-256 PBKDF2 iteration count during authentication. The client runs it inline with no upper bound, pinning a `tokio` worker thread for minutes per connection, possibly stalling the whole async runtime. Applications that connect only to a trusted database are not exposed; the risk applies to clients that may connect to untrusted or user-supplied servers, or whose connection can be intercepted by a man-in-the-middle.

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness

References