Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.
high severity
- Vulnerable module: moment
- Introduced through: modern-logger@1.5.83
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › modern-logger@1.5.83 › moment@2.29.1
Overview
moment is a lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal when a user provides a locale string which is directly used to switch moment locale.
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 moment
to version 2.29.2 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: moment
- Introduced through: modern-logger@1.5.83
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › modern-logger@1.5.83 › moment@2.29.1
Overview
moment is a lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the preprocessRFC2822()
function in from-string.js
, when processing a very long crafted string (over 10k characters).
PoC:
moment("(".repeat(500000))
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade moment
to version 2.29.4 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: lodash@4.17.20, health-checkup@1.0.44 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to lodash@4.17.21.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › health-checkup@1.0.44 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to health-checkup@1.0.45.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › modern-logger@1.5.83 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to modern-logger@1.5.86.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › random-http-useragent@1.1.32 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to random-http-useragent@1.1.33.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to serverful@1.4.90.
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Code Injection via template
.
PoC
var _ = require('lodash');
_.template('', { variable: '){console.log(process.env)}; with(obj' })()
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.21 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: inflight
- Introduced through: puppeteer-core@5.5.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › puppeteer-core@5.5.0 › rimraf@3.0.2 › glob@7.2.3 › inflight@1.0.6
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime via the makeres
function due to improperly deleting keys from the reqs
object after execution of callbacks. This behavior causes the keys to remain in the reqs
object, which leads to resource exhaustion.
Exploiting this vulnerability results in crashing the node
process or in the application crash.
Note: This library is not maintained, and currently, there is no fix for this issue. To overcome this vulnerability, several dependent packages have eliminated the use of this library.
To trigger the memory leak, an attacker would need to have the ability to execute or influence the asynchronous operations that use the inflight module within the application. This typically requires access to the internal workings of the server or application, which is not commonly exposed to remote users. Therefore, “Attack vector” is marked as “Local”.
PoC
const inflight = require('inflight');
function testInflight() {
let i = 0;
function scheduleNext() {
let key = `key-${i++}`;
const callback = () => {
};
for (let j = 0; j < 1000000; j++) {
inflight(key, callback);
}
setImmediate(scheduleNext);
}
if (i % 100 === 0) {
console.log(process.memoryUsage());
}
scheduleNext();
}
testInflight();
Remediation
There is no fixed version for inflight
.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: swagger-ui-dist
- Introduced through: serverful@1.4.89
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › hapi-swagger@13.1.0 › swagger-ui-dist@3.52.5
Overview
swagger-ui-dist is a module that exposes Swagger-UI's entire dist folder as a dependency-free npm module. Use swagger-ui instead, if you'd like to have npm install dependencies for you.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) via the ?url
parameter, which was intended to allow displaying remote OpenAPI definitions. This functionality may pose a risk for users who host their own SwaggerUI instances. In particular, including remote OpenAPI definitions opens a vector for phishing attacks by abusing the trusted names/domains of self-hosted instances.
NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2021-46708
Remediation
Upgrade swagger-ui-dist
to version 4.1.3 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: swagger-ui-dist
- Introduced through: serverful@1.4.89
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › hapi-swagger@13.1.0 › swagger-ui-dist@3.52.5
Overview
swagger-ui-dist is a module that exposes Swagger-UI's entire dist folder as a dependency-free npm module. Use swagger-ui instead, if you'd like to have npm install dependencies for you.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) via the ?url
parameter, which was intended to allow displaying remote OpenAPI definitions. This functionality may pose a risk for users who host their own SwaggerUI instances. In particular, including remote OpenAPI definitions opens a vector for phishing attacks by abusing the trusted names/domains of self-hosted instances.
NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2018-25031
Remediation
Upgrade swagger-ui-dist
to version 4.1.3 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: lodash@4.17.20, health-checkup@1.0.44 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to lodash@4.17.21.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › health-checkup@1.0.44 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to health-checkup@1.0.45.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › modern-logger@1.5.83 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to modern-logger@1.5.86.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › random-http-useragent@1.1.32 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to random-http-useragent@1.1.33.
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › lodash@4.17.20Remediation: Upgrade to serverful@1.4.90.
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the toNumber
, trim
and trimEnd
functions.
POC
var lo = require('lodash');
function build_blank (n) {
var ret = "1"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += " "
}
return ret + "1";
}
var s = build_blank(50000)
var time0 = Date.now();
lo.trim(s)
var time_cost0 = Date.now() - time0;
console.log("time_cost0: " + time_cost0)
var time1 = Date.now();
lo.toNumber(s)
var time_cost1 = Date.now() - time1;
console.log("time_cost1: " + time_cost1)
var time2 = Date.now();
lo.trimEnd(s)
var time_cost2 = Date.now() - time2;
console.log("time_cost2: " + time_cost2)
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.21 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: validator
- Introduced through: serverful@1.4.89
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › hapi-swagger@13.1.0 › swagger-parser@4.0.2 › z-schema@3.25.1 › validator@10.11.0
Overview
validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isSlug
function
PoC
var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "111"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "a"
}
return ret+"_";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
if (i % 10000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i)
validator.isSlug(attack_str)
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade validator
to version 13.6.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: validator
- Introduced through: serverful@1.4.89
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › hapi-swagger@13.1.0 › swagger-parser@4.0.2 › z-schema@3.25.1 › validator@10.11.0
Overview
validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isHSL
function.
PoC
var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "hsla(0"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += " "
}
return ret+"◎";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
if (i % 1000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i)
validator.isHSL(attack_str)
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade validator
to version 13.6.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: validator
- Introduced through: serverful@1.4.89
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: browser-as-a-service@hfreire/browser-as-a-service#1626e79b3bae0bbfaa34c7a397fe3bbc681e1db2 › serverful@1.4.89 › hapi-swagger@13.1.0 › swagger-parser@4.0.2 › z-schema@3.25.1 › validator@10.11.0
Overview
validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isEmail
function.
PoC
var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = ""
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "<"
}
return ret+"";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
if (i % 10000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i)
validator.isEmail(attack_str,{ allow_display_name: true })
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade validator
to version 13.6.0 or higher.