Fortinet Discovers MongoDB 'Regular Expression' Parsing Remote Denial of Service Vulnerability

Summary

Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered a remote denial of service vulnerability in MongoDB.
MongoDB is an open-source document-oriented database for multiple platforms, which provides high performance, high availability and automatic scaling. Compared with the traditional table-based relational database structure, MongoDB takes advantage of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster.
The vulnerability is caused due to incorrectly handling a specially-crafted regex string. It allows remote attackers to launch a denial of service attack.

Solutions

FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:

MongoDB.PCRE.Parsing.Stack.Consumption.Remote.DoS
Released Mar 18, 2015
Users should apply the solution provided by MongoDB.

Additional Information

This vulnerability actually resides in the very old 3rd-party PCRE library (http://www.pcre.org/), which was released 3 years ago, but still used in MongoDB.

Acknowledgement

This vulnerability was discovered by Xiaopeng Zhang of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs.

References

• http://www.mongodb.org/about/alerts/Â https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17252
• CVE-2015-2327

IPS Subscription

Fortinet customers who subscribe to Fortinet's intrusion prevention (IPS) service should be protected against this vulnerability with the appropriate configuration parameters in place. Fortinet's IPS service is one component of FortiGuard Subscription Services, which also offer comprehensive solutions such as antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam capabilities. These services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are continuously updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. These updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiClient products. Fortinet strictly follows responsible disclosure guidelines to ensure optimum protection during a threat's lifecycle.