CVE-2020-13578: 
NixOS vulnerability analysis and mitigation

A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2020-13578) was discovered in the WS-Security plugin functionality of Genivia gSOAP version 2.8.107. The vulnerability was disclosed to the vendor on November 5, 2020, and a patch was released on November 20, 2020. The affected component is the WS-Security plugin, which is used for implementing SOAP and web service standards (Talos Report).

The vulnerability stems from an uninitialized pointer being used during the processing of the BinarySecurityToken element in the WS-Security plugin. The BinarySecurityToken element, which can provide encoded X509 certificates, includes both EncodingType and ValueType attributes. When processing these elements, a pointer remains uninitialized during the soap_wsse_get_BinarySecurityTokenX509 function call, leading to potential access violations. The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS v3.0 score of 7.5 (HIGH) with vector CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H and is classified as a NULL Pointer Dereference (CWE-476) (Talos Report).

When exploited, this vulnerability can lead to a denial of service condition in the affected system. The impact is limited to availability, with no direct effect on confidentiality or integrity of the system (NVD).

An attacker can trigger this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted SOAP request via HTTP to the affected system. The vulnerability is remotely exploitable and requires no authentication or user interaction (Talos Report).

The vulnerability has been patched in multiple distributions. Fedora has released updates for versions 33 and 34 with gsoap-2.8.104-4, and Debian has provided security updates through DLA-3745-1 for version 2.8.75-1+deb10u1 (Debian LTS, Fedora Update).