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Overview

fast-xml-parser is a Validate XML, Parse XML, Build XML without C/C++ based libraries

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to XML Entity Expansion in replaceEntitiesValue() when handling excessive DOCTYPE input. An attacker can cause excessive resource consumption and make the application unresponsive by submitting malicious XML input with large text entities referenced multiple times. This is a bypass for Billion Laughs protection in DocTypeReader.js, which prevents excessive referencing within and entity, but doesn't prevent repeated expansion of large entities.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be mitigated by disabling DOCTYPE parsing using the processEntities: false option.

PoC

const { XMLParser } = require('fast-xml-parser');

const entity = 'A'.repeat(1000);
const refs = '&big;'.repeat(100);
const xml = `<!DOCTYPE foo [<!ENTITY big "${entity}">]><root>${refs}</root>`;

console.time('parse');
new XMLParser().parse(xml);
console.timeEnd('parse');

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 fast-xml-parser to version 4.5.4, 5.3.6 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

Overview

fast-xml-parser is a Validate XML, Parse XML, Build XML without C/C++ based libraries

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to XML Entity Expansion in the replaceEntitiesValue() function, which doesn't protect unlimited expansion of numeric entities the way it does DOCTYPE data (as described and fixed for CVE-2026-26278). An attacker can exhaust system memory and CPU resources by submitting XML input containing a large number of numeric character references - &#NNN; and &#xHH;.

Note: This is a bypass for the fix to the DOCTYPE expansion vulnerability in 5.3.6.

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 fast-xml-parser to version 5.5.6 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release

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

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

fast-xml-parser is a Validate XML, Parse XML, Build XML without C/C++ based libraries

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input in the DocTypeReader component when the maxEntityCount or maxEntitySize configuration options are explicitly set to 0. Due to JavaScript's falsy evaluation, the intended limits are bypassed. An attacker can cause unbounded entity expansion and exhaust server memory by supplying crafted XML input containing numerous large entities.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the application is configured with processEntities enabled and either maxEntityCount or maxEntitySize set to 0.

PoC

const { XMLParser } = require("fast-xml-parser");

// Developer intends: "no entities allowed at all"
const parser = new XMLParser({
  processEntities: {
    enabled: true,
    maxEntityCount: 0,    // should mean "zero entities allowed"
    maxEntitySize: 0       // should mean "zero-length entities only"
  }
});

// Generate XML with many large entities
let entities = "";
for (let i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  entities += `<!ENTITY e${i} "${"A".repeat(100000)}">`;
}

const xml = `<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
  ${entities}
]>
<foo>&e0;</foo>`;

// This should throw "Entity count exceeds maximum" but does not
try {
  const result = parser.parse(xml);
  console.log("VULNERABLE: parsed without error, entities bypassed limits");
} catch (e) {
  console.log("SAFE:", e.message);
}

// Control test: setting maxEntityCount to 1 correctly blocks
const safeParser = new XMLParser({
  processEntities: {
    enabled: true,
    maxEntityCount: 1,
    maxEntitySize: 100
  }
});

try {
  safeParser.parse(xml);
  console.log("ERROR: should have thrown");
} catch (e) {
  console.log("CONTROL:", e.message);  // "Entity count (2) exceeds maximum allowed (1)"
}

Remediation

Upgrade fast-xml-parser to version 5.5.7 or higher.

References

• GitHub Advisory
• 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 the parseArrayValue function when the comma option is in use. An attacker can exhaust system memory by submitting a parameter containing a large number of comma-separated values, resulting in the allocation of excessively large arrays.

Note: This is only exploitable if the comma option is explicitly set to true. arrayLimit is properly enforced for index and bracket notation.

PoC

const qs = require('qs');

const payload = 'a=' + ','.repeat(25);  // 26 elements after split (bypasses arrayLimit: 5)
const options = { comma: true, arrayLimit: 5, throwOnLimitExceeded: true };

try {
  const result = qs.parse(payload, options);
  console.log(result.a.length);  // Outputs: 26 (bypass successful)
} catch (e) {
  console.log('Limit enforced:', e.message);  // Not thrown
}

Remediation

Upgrade qs to version 6.14.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

fast-xml-parser is a Validate XML, Parse XML, Build XML without C/C++ based libraries

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Incorrect Regular Expression in the entity parsing RegEx in DOCTYPE declarations. An attacker can inject arbitrary values that override built-in XML entities by crafting entity names containing ., which is interpreted as a regex wildcard, allowing malicious content to be substituted in place of standard entities when the XML is parsed and subsequently rendered or used in sensitive contexts.

Remediation

Upgrade fast-xml-parser to version 4.5.4, 5.3.5 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Release