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CVE-2023-40583: libp2p nodes vulnerable to OOM attack

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-08-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-400

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.

Affected products

• libp2p js-libp2p: before 0.27.4 — fixed in 0.27.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: libp2p js-libp2p 0.27.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• 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
• 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
• https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/security/advisories/GHSA-gcq9-qqwx-rgj3

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