High

SystemDS CPU exhaustion vulnerability

  • Disclosed: 27.06.2022
  • Updated: 11.10.2026 11:20

The Security Team noticed that the termination condition of the for loop in the readExternal method is a controllable variable, which, if tampered with, may lead to CPU exhaustion. As a fix, we added an upper bound and termination condition in the read and write logic. We classify it as a "low-priority but useful improvement". SystemDS is a distributed system and needs to serialize/deserialize data but in many code paths (e.g., on Spark broadcast/shuffle or writing to sequence files) the byte stream is anyway protected by additional CRC fingerprints. In this particular case though, the number of decoders is upper-bounded by twice the number of columns, which means an attacker would need to modify two entries in the byte stream in a consistent manner. By adding these checks robustness was strictly improved with almost zero overhead. These code changes are available in versions higher than 2.2.1.

Affected software

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PlatformPackageVulnerable versionsFixed in
Java / Kotlin (Maven) org.apache.systemds:systemds < 2.2.2 2.2.2
Python (PyPI) systemds < 2.2.2 2.2.2

References

CVSS score 7.5/10
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-400
Platform
Java / Kotlin (Maven), Python (PyPI)
Package
org.apache.systemds:systemds, systemds
Disclosed
27.06.2022
Updated
11.10.2026 11:20

Sources and licenses

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - PYSEC-2022-222 - PyPA Advisory Database; CC BY 4.0

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-m43h-hfrq-x8wx - CC BY 4.0

Vulnerability history: org.apache.systemds:systemds

All published vulnerabilities of this package (Java / Kotlin (Maven)), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.

This is the only known vulnerability of this package.

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