Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: katex
- Introduced through: ngx-markdown@8.2.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › ngx-markdown@8.2.2 › katex@0.11.1Remediation: Upgrade to ngx-markdown@14.0.0.
Overview
katex is a Fast math typesetting for the web.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Unchecked Input for Loop Condition when handling \edef
commands. An attacker can cause a near-infinite loop, leading to memory overflow, tying up the main thread, or stack overflow by crafting malicious input using \edef
that bypasses the maxExpand
setting designed to prevent such issues.
Note:
This vulnerability is particularly concerning for users who render untrusted mathematical expressions, as it can be exploited to perform an availability attack, rendering the service unusable.
Workaround
This vulnerability can be mitigated by forbidding inputs containing the substring "\\edef"
before passing them to the affected package.
Remediation
Upgrade katex
to version 0.16.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: katex
- Introduced through: ngx-markdown@8.2.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › ngx-markdown@8.2.2 › katex@0.11.1Remediation: Upgrade to ngx-markdown@14.0.0.
Overview
katex is a Fast math typesetting for the web.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output when handling the \includegraphics
command. An attacker can execute arbitrary JavaScript or generate invalid HTML by exploiting the lack of proper filename escaping in the \includegraphics
command.
Note:
This is only exploitable if the trust
option is enabled or not properly configured to restrict the \includegraphics
commands.
Workaround
This vulnerability can be mitigated by either avoiding the use of or turning off the trust
option, setting it to forbid \includegraphics
commands, forbidding inputs containing the substring "\\includegraphics"
, or sanitizing HTML output from the package.
Remediation
Upgrade katex
to version 0.16.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: ngx-markdown@8.2.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › ngx-markdown@8.2.2 › marked@0.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to ngx-markdown@9.1.0.
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The em
regex within src/rules.js
file have multiple unused capture groups which could lead to a denial of service attack if user input is reachable.
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:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- 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 marked
to version 1.1.1 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: katex
- Introduced through: ngx-markdown@8.2.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › ngx-markdown@8.2.2 › katex@0.11.1Remediation: Upgrade to ngx-markdown@14.0.0.
Overview
katex is a Fast math typesetting for the web.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Incomplete List of Disallowed Inputs due to the trust
option. Specifically, the functionality that provides a function to blacklist certain URL protocols, can be bypassed by URLs in malicious inputs that utilize uppercase characters in the protocol. This can allow for the generation of javascript:
links in the output, even when the trust
function is designed to forbid this protocol.
Workaround
Users can apply the following steps to mitigate the vulnerability:
Allow-list instead of block protocols in your trust function.
Manually lowercase context.protocol via context.protocol.toLowerCase() before attempting to check for certain protocols.
Avoid use of or turn off the trust option.
Remediation
Upgrade katex
to version 0.16.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: ngx-markdown@8.2.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › ngx-markdown@8.2.2 › marked@0.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to ngx-markdown@11.2.0.
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when passing unsanitized user input to inline.reflinkSearch
, if it is not being parsed by a time-limited worker thread.
PoC
import * as marked from 'marked';
console.log(marked.parse(`[x]: x
\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](`));
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:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- 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 marked
to version 4.0.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: ngx-markdown@8.2.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › ngx-markdown@8.2.2 › marked@0.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to ngx-markdown@11.2.0.
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when unsanitized user input is passed to block.def
.
PoC
import * as marked from "marked";
marked.parse(`[x]:${' '.repeat(1500)}x ${' '.repeat(1500)} x`);
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:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- 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 marked
to version 4.0.10 or higher.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: @angular/core
- Introduced through: @angular/core@8.1.3
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: openexo-toolkit@exolever/exo-design-system#7db0fc7aa3c9bdcc53758125278915ed919f480f › @angular/core@8.1.3Remediation: Upgrade to @angular/core@11.0.5.
Overview
@angular/core 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) in development, with SSR enabled.
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 <
; and >
can be coded as >
; 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
Upgrade @angular/core
to version 11.0.5, 11.1.0-next.3 or higher.