Security researchers at KTrust have unearthed three critical vulnerabilities within Argo, a widely-used GitOps continuous delivery tool prevalent in Kubernetes environments. These vulnerabilities, flagged as CVE-2024-21662, CVE-2024-21652, and CVE-2024-21661, pose substantial risks to system security, including the potential for bypassing rate limit and brute force protection mechanisms, enabling denial of service (DoS) attacks, and compromising user account safety. KTrust’s investigation revealed intricate exploitation methods, such as flooding the system with login attempts to overload the cache, thereby nullifying protective measures.
The first vulnerability, CVE-2024-21662, involves exploiting the cache system’s overload to bypass rate limits and brute force protection, leaving the system vulnerable to attacks by discarding older entries. Researchers demonstrated this flaw by inundating the system with login attempts, surpassing the cache’s capacity and leading to the deletion of crucial information, including failed admin login attempts. Additionally, the second vulnerability, CVE-2024-21652, capitalizes on application crashes to bypass brute force protection, facilitating repeated login attempts without restriction due to the loss of in-memory data.
The third vulnerability, CVE-2024-21661, presents a particularly severe risk as it enables DoS attacks through improper array manipulation in multi-threaded environments. KTrust highlighted the vulnerability’s root cause as flawed coding practices, wherein concurrent modification of an array during iteration leads to system instability. Nadav Aharon-Nov, KTrust’s CTO and co-founder, emphasized the importance of swift action, noting that Argo plans to address these issues in an upcoming product release. Aharon-Nov stressed the significance of promptly rectifying such vulnerabilities to avert potential security breaches, underscoring the imperative for ongoing vigilance and enhancement of security protocols by developers and security professionals alike.
