CVE-2023-30082
📋 TL;DR
CVE-2023-30082 is a denial-of-service vulnerability in osTicket where submitting an extremely long password (over 10 million characters) causes excessive CPU and memory consumption, potentially crashing the server. This affects all osTicket installations with vulnerable versions exposed to user input. Attackers can exploit this to make the website unresponsive.
💻 Affected Systems
- osTicket
📦 What is this software?
Osticket by Enhancesoft
⚠️ Risk & Real-World Impact
Worst Case
Complete service outage where the osTicket server becomes unresponsive, requiring manual restart and causing extended downtime for ticket management systems.
Likely Case
Temporary service degradation or crash affecting ticket submission and management until the server is restarted.
If Mitigated
Minimal impact with proper input validation and resource limits in place.
🎯 Exploit Status
Simple HTTP request with long password parameter can trigger the vulnerability. No authentication required.
🛠️ Fix & Mitigation
✅ Official Fix
Patch Version: Check osTicket GitHub repository for latest security patches
Vendor Advisory: https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket
Restart Required: Yes
Instructions:
1. Backup current osTicket installation
2. Update to latest osTicket version from official repository
3. Restart web server service
4. Verify functionality
🔧 Temporary Workarounds
Input Length Restriction
allImplement server-side validation to limit password field length
Configure web server (Apache/Nginx) to limit request body size
Add application-level input validation for max password length
Rate Limiting
linuxImplement request rate limiting to prevent repeated exploitation attempts
Use web application firewall rules to limit requests per IP
Configure fail2ban or similar tools to block suspicious patterns
🧯 If You Can't Patch
- Implement web application firewall (WAF) with input validation rules to block excessively long passwords
- Monitor server resource usage and set up alerts for abnormal CPU/memory consumption
🔍 How to Verify
Check if Vulnerable:
Test by submitting a password field with over 10 million characters to login/password reset endpoints and monitor server resource usage.Check Version:
Check osTicket version in admin panel or review source code version filesVerify Fix Applied:
After patching, attempt the same test and verify server remains responsive with normal resource usage.📡 Detection & Monitoring
Log Indicators:
- Unusually large HTTP POST requests to login/password endpoints
- Server error logs showing memory exhaustion or timeout errors
- Web server logs with extremely long parameter values
Network Indicators:
- Large HTTP requests (>10MB) to osTicket endpoints
- Multiple rapid requests to authentication endpoints
SIEM Query:
source="web_logs" url="*/scp/login.php" OR url="*/password.php" request_size>10000000