Vulnerabilities

38 via 197 paths

Dependencies

555

Source

GitHub

Commit

a3c5814b

Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Severity
  • 2
  • 18
  • 16
  • 2
Status
  • 38
  • 0
  • 0

critical severity

Improper Input Validation

  • Vulnerable module: socket.io-parser
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.2.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 socket.io-parser@2.3.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.2.0.

Overview

socket.io-parser is a socket.io protocol parser

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Input Validation. when parsing attachments containing untrusted user input. Attackers can overwrite the _placeholder object to place references to functions in query objects.

PoC

const decoder = new Decoder();

decoder.on("decoded", (packet) => {
  console.log(packet.data); // prints [ 'hello', [Function: splice] ]
})

decoder.add('51-["hello",{"_placeholder":true,"num":"splice"}]');
decoder.add(Buffer.from("world"));

Remediation

Upgrade socket.io-parser to version 3.3.3, 3.4.2, 4.0.5, 4.2.1 or higher.

References

critical severity

Incomplete List of Disallowed Inputs

  • Vulnerable module: babel-traverse
  • Introduced through: babel-core@6.26.3 and babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-block-scoping@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-helpers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-block-scoping@6.26.0 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-computed-properties@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-systemjs@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-function-name@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-object-super@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-helper-call-delegate@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-function-name@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-object-super@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-define-map@6.26.0 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-helpers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-define-map@6.26.0 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Incomplete List of Disallowed Inputs when using plugins that rely on the path.evaluate() or path.evaluateTruthy() internal Babel methods.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the attacker uses known affected plugins such as @babel/plugin-transform-runtime, @babel/preset-env when using its useBuiltIns option, and any "polyfill provider" plugin that depends on @babel/helper-define-polyfill-provider. No other plugins under the @babel/ namespace are impacted, but third-party plugins might be.

Users that only compile trusted code are not impacted.

Workaround

Users who are unable to upgrade the library can upgrade the affected plugins instead, to avoid triggering the vulnerable code path in affected @babel/traverse.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for babel-traverse.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: ajv
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 ajv@4.11.8
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.11.0.

Overview

ajv is an Another JSON Schema Validator

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. A carefully crafted JSON schema could be provided that allows execution of other code by prototype pollution. (While untrusted schemas are recommended against, the worst case of an untrusted schema should be a denial of service, not execution of code.)

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade ajv to version 6.12.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Internal Property Tampering

  • Vulnerable module: bson
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21 and mongodb@2.2.36

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.3.9.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongodb@2.2.36 mongodb-core@2.1.20 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongodb@3.1.3.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 mongodb@2.2.34 mongodb-core@2.1.18 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.2.9.

Overview

bson is a BSON Parser for node and browser.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Internal Property Tampering. The package will ignore an unknown value for an object's _bsotype, leading to cases where an object is serialized as a document rather than the intended BSON type.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2019-2391

Remediation

Upgrade bson to version 1.1.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Internal Property Tampering

  • Vulnerable module: bson
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21 and mongodb@2.2.36

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.3.9.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongodb@2.2.36 mongodb-core@2.1.20 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongodb@3.1.3.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 mongodb@2.2.34 mongodb-core@2.1.18 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.2.9.

Overview

bson is a BSON Parser for node and browser.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Internal Property Tampering. The package will ignore an unknown value for an object's _bsotype, leading to cases where an object is serialized as a document rather than the intended BSON type.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2020-7610

Remediation

Upgrade bson to version 1.1.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mongoose
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.13.20.

Overview

mongoose is a Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in document.js, via update functions such as findByIdAndUpdate(). This allows attackers to achieve remote code execution.

Note: Only applications using Express and EJS are vulnerable.

PoC


import { connect, model, Schema } from 'mongoose';

await connect('mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/exploit');

const Example = model('Example', new Schema({ hello: String }));

const example = await new Example({ hello: 'world!' }).save();
await Example.findByIdAndUpdate(example._id, {
    $rename: {
        hello: '__proto__.polluted'
    }
});

// this is what causes the pollution
await Example.find();

const test = {};
console.log(test.polluted); // world!
console.log(Object.prototype); // [Object: null prototype] { polluted: 'world!' }

process.exit();

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade mongoose to version 5.13.20, 6.11.3, 7.3.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Remote Code Execution (RCE)

  • Vulnerable module: pug
  • Introduced through: pug@2.0.4 and pug-cli@1.0.0-alpha6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a pug@2.0.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to pug@3.0.1.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a pug-cli@1.0.0-alpha6 pug@2.0.4

Overview

pug is an A clean, whitespace-sensitive template language for writing HTML

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE). If a remote attacker was able to control the pretty option of the pug compiler, e.g. if you spread a user provided object such as the query parameters of a request into the pug template inputs, it was possible for them to achieve remote code execution on the node.js backend.

Remediation

Upgrade pug to version 3.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: angular
  • Introduced through: angular@1.8.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a angular@1.8.3

Overview

angular is a package that lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It also lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). A regular expression used to split the value of the ng-srcset directive is vulnerable to super-linear runtime due to backtracking. With large carefully-crafted input, this can result in catastrophic backtracking and cause a denial of service.

Note:

This package is EOL and will not receive any updates to address this issue. Users should migrate to @angular/core.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for angular.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ansi-regex
  • Introduced through: pug-cli@1.0.0-alpha6, babel-core@6.26.3 and others

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a pug-cli@1.0.0-alpha6 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a pug-cli@1.0.0-alpha6 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 yargs@6.6.0 string-width@1.0.2 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.4.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 yargs@6.6.0 cliui@3.2.0 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 yargs@6.6.0 cliui@3.2.0 string-width@1.0.2 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 yargs@6.6.0 cliui@3.2.0 wrap-ansi@2.1.0 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-block-scoping@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-block-scoping@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 yargs@6.6.0 cliui@3.2.0 wrap-ansi@2.1.0 string-width@1.0.2 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-helpers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-block-scoping@6.26.0 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-computed-properties@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-systemjs@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-function-name@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-object-super@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-helper-call-delegate@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-helpers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-block-scoping@6.26.0 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-computed-properties@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-systemjs@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-function-name@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-object-super@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters@6.24.1 babel-helper-call-delegate@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-function-name@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-object-super@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-define-map@6.26.0 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-function-name@6.24.1 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-object-super@6.24.1 babel-helper-replace-supers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-define-map@6.26.0 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-helpers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-define-map@6.26.0 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 babel-helpers@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-classes@6.24.1 babel-helper-define-map@6.26.0 babel-helper-function-name@6.24.1 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-preset-es2015@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-umd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-amd@6.24.1 babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs@6.26.2 babel-template@6.26.0 babel-traverse@6.26.0 babel-code-frame@6.26.0 chalk@1.1.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to the sub-patterns [[\\]()#;?]* and (?:;[-a-zA-Z\\d\\/#&.:=?%@~_]*)*.

PoC

import ansiRegex from 'ansi-regex';

for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
    var time = Date.now();
    var attack_str = "\u001B["+";".repeat(i*10000);
    ansiRegex().test(attack_str)
    var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
    console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade ansi-regex to version 3.0.1, 4.1.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: async
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 async@2.6.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.7.3.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the mapValues() method, due to improper check in createObjectIterator function.

PoC

//when objects are parsed, all properties are created as own (the objects can come from outside sources (http requests/ file))
const hasOwn = JSON.parse('{"__proto__": {"isAdmin": true}}');

//does not have the property,  because it's inside object's own "__proto__"
console.log(hasOwn.isAdmin);

async.mapValues(hasOwn, (val, key, cb) => cb(null, val), (error, result) => {
  // after the method executes, hasOwn.__proto__ value (isAdmin: true) replaces the prototype of the newly created object, leading to potential exploits.
  console.log(result.isAdmin);
});

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade async to version 2.6.4, 3.2.2 or higher.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: engine.io
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@3.0.0.

Overview

engine.io is a realtime engine behind Socket.IO. It provides the foundation of a bidirectional connection between client and server

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) via a POST request to the long polling transport.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

Remediation

Upgrade engine.io to version 4.0.0 or higher.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: engine.io
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.5.0.

Overview

engine.io is a realtime engine behind Socket.IO. It provides the foundation of a bidirectional connection between client and server

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). A malicious client could send a specially crafted HTTP request, triggering an uncaught exception and killing the Node.js process.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

Remediation

Upgrade engine.io to version 3.6.1, 6.2.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 loader-utils@0.2.17
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in parseQuery function via the name variable in parseQuery.js. This pollutes the prototype of the object returned by parseQuery and not the global Object prototype (which is the commonly understood definition of Prototype Pollution). Therefore, the actual impact will depend on how applications utilize the returned object and how they filter unwanted keys.

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade loader-utils to version 1.4.1, 2.0.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: mongodb
  • Introduced through: mongodb@2.2.36 and mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongodb@2.2.36
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongodb@3.1.13.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 mongodb@2.2.34
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.4.10.

Overview

mongodb is an official MongoDB driver for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The package fails to properly catch an exception when a collection name is invalid and the DB does not exist, crashing the application.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade mongodb to version 3.1.13 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mquery
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 mquery@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.12.3.

Overview

mquery is an Expressive query building for MongoDB

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the mergeClone() function.

PoC by zhou, peng

mquery = require('mquery');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"polluted":"HACKED"}}';
console.log('Before:', {}.polluted); // undefined
mquery.utils.mergeClone({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log('After:', {}.polluted); // HACKED

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade mquery to version 3.2.5 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: parsejson
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 parsejson@0.0.3
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 parsejson@0.0.3

Overview

parsejson is a method that parses a JSON string and returns a JSON object.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks. An attacker may pass a specially crafted JSON data, causing the server to hang.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for parsejson.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: socket.io-parser
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.2.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 socket.io-parser@2.3.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.2.0.

Overview

socket.io-parser is a socket.io protocol parser

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) via a large packet because a concatenation approach is used.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

Remediation

Upgrade socket.io-parser to version 3.3.2, 3.4.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: unset-value
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 nanomatch@1.2.13 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 nanomatch@1.2.13 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 expand-brackets@2.1.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 expand-brackets@2.1.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the unset function in index.js, because it allows access to object prototype properties.

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade unset-value to version 2.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mquery
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 mquery@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.11.7.

Overview

mquery is an Expressive query building for MongoDB

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the merge function within lib/utils.js. Depending on if user input is provided, an attacker can overwrite and pollute the object prototype of a program.

PoC

   require('./env').getCollection(function(err, collection) {
      assert.ifError(err);
      col = collection;
      done();
    });
    var payload = JSON.parse('{"__proto__": {"polluted": "vulnerable"}}');
    var m = mquery(payload);
    console.log({}.polluted);
// The empty object {} will have a property called polluted which will print vulnerable

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade mquery to version 3.2.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mongoose
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.13.15.

Overview

mongoose is a Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in the Schema.path() function.

Note: CVE-2022-24304 is a duplicate of CVE-2022-2564.

PoC:

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
const schema = new mongoose.Schema();

malicious_payload = '__proto__.toString'

schema.path(malicious_payload, [String])

x = {}
console.log(x.toString())

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade mongoose to version 5.13.15, 6.4.6 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: json5
  • Introduced through: babel-core@6.26.3 and webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 json5@0.5.1
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 json5@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 loader-utils@0.2.17 json5@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a babel-core@6.26.3 babel-register@6.26.0 babel-core@6.26.3 json5@0.5.1

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the parse method , which does not restrict parsing of keys named __proto__, allowing specially crafted strings to pollute the prototype of the resulting object. This pollutes the prototype of the object returned by JSON5.parse and not the global Object prototype (which is the commonly understood definition of Prototype Pollution). Therefore, the actual impact will depend on how applications utilize the returned object and how they filter unwanted keys.

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade json5 to version 1.0.2, 2.2.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime

  • Vulnerable module: inflight
  • Introduced through: stylus@0.54.8

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a stylus@0.54.8 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime via the makeres function due to improperly deleting keys from the reqs object after execution of callbacks. This behavior causes the keys to remain in the reqs object, which leads to resource exhaustion.

Exploiting this vulnerability results in crashing the node process or in the application crash.

Note: This library is not maintained, and currently, there is no fix for this issue. To overcome this vulnerability, several dependent packages have eliminated the use of this library.

To trigger the memory leak, an attacker would need to have the ability to execute or influence the asynchronous operations that use the inflight module within the application. This typically requires access to the internal workings of the server or application, which is not commonly exposed to remote users. Therefore, “Attack vector” is marked as “Local”.

PoC

const inflight = require('inflight');

function testInflight() {
  let i = 0;
  function scheduleNext() {
    let key = `key-${i++}`;
    const callback = () => {
    };
    for (let j = 0; j < 1000000; j++) {
      inflight(key, callback);
    }

    setImmediate(scheduleNext);
  }


  if (i % 100 === 0) {
    console.log(process.memoryUsage());
  }

  scheduleNext();
}

testInflight();

Remediation

There is no fixed version for inflight.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mongoose
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.12.2.

Overview

mongoose is a Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The mongoose.Schema() function is subject to prototype pollution due to the recursively calling of Schema.prototype.add() function to add new items into the schema object. This vulnerability allows modification of the Object prototype.

PoC

mongoose = require('mongoose');
mongoose.version; //'5.12.0'
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"polluted":"HACKED"}}';
console.log('Before:', {}.polluted); // undefined
mongoose.Schema(JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log('After:', {}.polluted); // HACKED

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade mongoose to version 5.12.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mpath
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a mongoose@4.13.21 mpath@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.13.9.

Overview

mpath is a package that gets/sets javascript object values using MongoDB-like path notation.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. A type confusion vulnerability can lead to a bypass of CVE-2018-16490. In particular, the condition ignoreProperties.indexOf(parts[i]) !== -1 returns -1 if parts[i] is ['__proto__']. This is because the method that has been called if the input is an array is Array.prototype.indexOf() and not String.prototype.indexOf(). They behave differently depending on the type of the input.

PoC

const mpath = require('mpath');
// mpath.set(['__proto__', 'polluted'], 'yes', {});
// console.log(polluted); // ReferenceError: polluted is not defined

mpath.set([['__proto__'], 'polluted'], 'yes', {});
console.log(polluted); // yes

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade mpath to version 0.8.4 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: yargs-parser
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 yargs@6.6.0 yargs-parser@4.2.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@4.0.0.

Overview

yargs-parser is a mighty option parser used by yargs.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The library could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype using a __proto__ payload.

Our research team checked several attack vectors to verify this vulnerability:

  1. It could be used for privilege escalation.
  2. The library could be used to parse user input received from different sources:
    • terminal emulators
    • system calls from other code bases
    • CLI RPC servers

PoC by Snyk

const parser = require("yargs-parser");
console.log(parser('--foo.__proto__.bar baz'));
console.log(({}).bar);

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

  1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

  4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

  5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018

Remediation

Upgrade yargs-parser to version 5.0.1, 13.1.2, 15.0.1, 18.1.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: angular
  • Introduced through: angular@1.8.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a angular@1.8.3

Overview

angular is a package that lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It also lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) by providing a custom locale rule that makes it possible to assign the parameter in posPre: ' '.repeat() of NUMBER_FORMATS.PATTERNS[1].posPre with a very high value.

Note:

  1. This package has been deprecated and is no longer maintained.

  2. The vulnerable versions are 1.7.0 and higher.

PoC:


class AppCtrl {
  constructor($locale, $timeout) {
    'ngInject';
    const ctrl = this;
    ctrl.currencySymbol = '$';
    ctrl.amount = 100;
    ctrl.posPre = $locale.NUMBER_FORMATS.PATTERNS[1].posPre;

    ctrl.onPosPreChange = () => {
      $locale.NUMBER_FORMATS.PATTERNS[1].posPre = ctrl.posPre;
      const amount = ctrl.amount;
      ctrl.amount = 0;
      $timeout(() => (ctrl.amount = amount));
    };

    ctrl.onReDos = () => {
      ctrl.currencySymbol = '';
      ctrl.posPre = ' '.repeat(1000000);
      $locale.NUMBER_FORMATS.PATTERNS[1].posPre = ctrl.posPre;
    };
  }
}

export default AppCtrl;

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for angular.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: angular
  • Introduced through: angular@1.8.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a angular@1.8.3

Overview

angular is a package that lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It also lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the angular.copy() utility function due to the usage of an insecure regular expression. Exploiting this vulnerability is possible by a large carefully-crafted input, which can result in catastrophic backtracking.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for angular.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: angular
  • Introduced through: angular@1.8.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a angular@1.8.3

Overview

angular is a package that lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It also lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the $resource service due to the usage of an insecure regular expression. Exploiting this vulnerability is possible by a large carefully-crafted input, which can result in catastrophic backtracking.

PoC

The vulnerability manifests itself when the $resource service is used with a URL that contains a large number of slashes followed by a non-slash character (for example, /some/url/////.../////foo):

$resource('/some/url/${manySlashesFollowedByNonSlash}`).query();

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for angular.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: angular
  • Introduced through: angular@1.8.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a angular@1.8.3

Overview

angular is a package that lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It also lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the <input type="url"> element due to the usage of an insecure regular expression in the input[url] functionality. Exploiting this vulnerability is possible by a large carefully-crafted input, which can result in catastrophic backtracking.

PoC

The vulnerability manifests itself when a <input type="url"> element is filled with an invalid URL consisting of any scheme followed by a large number of slashes (for example, http://///.../////):

<input type="url" ng-model="urlWithManySlashes" />

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for angular.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: glob-parent
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 glob-parent@3.1.0

Overview

glob-parent is a package that helps extracting the non-magic parent path from a glob string.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The enclosure regex used to check for strings ending in enclosure containing path separator.

PoC by Yeting Li

var globParent = require("glob-parent")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "{"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "/"
}

return ret;
}

globParent(build_attack(5000));

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade glob-parent to version 5.1.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 loader-utils@0.2.17
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the resourcePath variable in interpolateName.js.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade loader-utils to version 1.4.2, 2.0.4, 3.2.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 loader-utils@0.2.17
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in interpolateName function via the URL variable.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade loader-utils to version 1.4.2, 2.0.4, 3.2.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Insecure Defaults

  • Vulnerable module: socket.io
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.4.0.

Overview

socket.io is a node.js realtime framework server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Insecure Defaults due to CORS Misconfiguration. All domains are whitelisted by default.

Remediation

Upgrade socket.io to version 2.4.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: uglify-js
  • Introduced through: webpack@2.7.0, pug@2.0.4 and others

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a webpack@2.7.0 uglify-js@2.8.29
    Remediation: Upgrade to webpack@3.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a pug@2.0.4 pug-filters@3.1.1 uglify-js@2.8.29
    Remediation: Upgrade to pug@3.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a pug-cli@1.0.0-alpha6 pug@2.0.4 pug-filters@3.1.1 uglify-js@2.8.29

Overview

uglify-js is a JavaScript parser, minifier, compressor and beautifier toolkit.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the string_template and the decode_template functions.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade uglify-js to version 3.14.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ws
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5 ws@1.1.5
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.3.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 ws@1.1.5
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.4.0.

Overview

ws is a simple to use websocket client, server and console for node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). A specially crafted value of the Sec-Websocket-Protocol header can be used to significantly slow down a ws server.

##PoC

for (const length of [1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, 32000]) {
  const value = 'b' + ' '.repeat(length) + 'x';
  const start = process.hrtime.bigint();

  value.trim().split(/ *, */);

  const end = process.hrtime.bigint();

  console.log('length = %d, time = %f ns', length, end - start);
}

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade ws to version 7.4.6, 6.2.2, 5.2.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

  • Vulnerable module: angular
  • Introduced through: angular@1.8.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a angular@1.8.3

Overview

angular is a package that lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It also lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) due to insecure page caching in the Internet Explorer browser, which allows interpolation of <textarea> elements.

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for angular.

References

low severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: debug
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.2.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0
    Remediation: Open PR to patch debug@2.2.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.2.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 debug@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0
    Remediation: Open PR to patch debug@2.2.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.

Overview

debug is a small debugging utility.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the function useColors via manipulation of the str argument. The vulnerability can cause a very low impact of about 2 seconds of matching time for data 50k characters long.

Note: CVE-2017-20165 is a duplicate of this vulnerability.

PoC

Use the following regex in the %o formatter.

/\s*\n\s*/

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade debug to version 2.6.9, 3.1.0, 3.2.7, 4.3.1 or higher.

References

low severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ms
  • Introduced through: socket.io@1.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.2.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0 ms@0.7.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0 ms@0.7.1
    Remediation: Open PR to patch ms@0.7.1.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0 ms@0.7.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 engine.io@1.8.5 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.2.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 engine.io-client@1.8.6 debug@2.3.3 ms@0.7.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0 ms@0.7.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-adapter@0.5.0 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0 ms@0.7.1
    Remediation: Open PR to patch ms@0.7.1.
  • Introduced through: ProjectName@bag-man/nodestack#a3c5814b9e6258c7245f5eedd08d33797b07776a socket.io@1.7.4 socket.io-client@1.7.4 socket.io-parser@2.3.1 debug@2.2.0 ms@0.7.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to socket.io@2.0.0.

Overview

ms is a tiny millisecond conversion utility.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to an incomplete fix for previously reported vulnerability npm:ms:20151024. The fix limited the length of accepted input string to 10,000 characters, and turned to be insufficient making it possible to block the event loop for 0.3 seconds (on a typical laptop) with a specially crafted string passed to ms() function.

Proof of concept

ms = require('ms');
ms('1'.repeat(9998) + 'Q') // Takes about ~0.3s

Note: Snyk's patch for this vulnerability limits input length to 100 characters. This new limit was deemed to be a breaking change by the author. Based on user feedback, we believe the risk of breakage is very low, while the value to your security is much greater, and therefore opted to still capture this change in a patch for earlier versions as well. Whenever patching security issues, we always suggest to run tests on your code to validate that nothing has been broken.

For more information on Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks, go to our blog.

Disclosure Timeline

  • Feb 9th, 2017 - Reported the issue to package owner.
  • Feb 11th, 2017 - Issue acknowledged by package owner.
  • April 12th, 2017 - Fix PR opened by Snyk Security Team.
  • May 15th, 2017 - Vulnerability published.
  • May 16th, 2017 - Issue fixed and version 2.0.0 released.
  • May 21th, 2017 - Patches released for versions >=0.7.1, <=1.0.0.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

  • A The string must start with the letter 'A'
  • (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
  • D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

  1. CCC
  2. CC+C
  3. C+CC
  4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade ms to version 2.0.0 or higher.

References