oaeproject/Hilary
Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.
critical severity
- Vulnerable module: xmldom
- Introduced through: passport-twitter@1.0.4
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-twitter@1.0.4 › xtraverse@0.1.0 › xmldom@0.1.31
Overview
xmldom is an A pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Input Validation due to parsing XML that is not well-formed, and contains multiple top-level elements. All the root nodes are being added to the childNodes
collection of the Document
, without reporting or throwing any error.
Workarounds
One of the following approaches might help, depending on your use case:
Instead of searching for elements in the whole DOM, only search in the
documentElement
.Reject a document with a document that has more than 1
childNode
.
PoC
var DOMParser = require('xmldom').DOMParser;
var xmlData = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n' +
'<root>\n' +
' <branch girth="large">\n' +
' <leaf color="green" />\n' +
' </branch>\n' +
'</root>\n' +
'<root>\n' +
' <branch girth="twig">\n' +
' <leaf color="gold" />\n' +
' </branch>\n' +
'</root>\n';
var xmlDOM = new DOMParser().parseFromString(xmlData);
console.log(xmlDOM.toString());
This will result with the following output:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root>
<branch girth="large">
<leaf color="green"/>
</branch>
</root>
<root>
<branch girth="twig">
<leaf color="gold"/>
</branch>
</root>
Remediation
There is no fixed version for xmldom
.
References
critical severity
- Vulnerable module: sharp
- Introduced through: sharp@0.30.7
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › sharp@0.30.7Remediation: Upgrade to sharp@0.32.6.
Overview
sharp is a High performance Node.js image processing, the fastest module to resize JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, AVIF and TIFF images
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Heap-based Buffer Overflow when the ReadHuffmanCodes()
function is used. An attacker can craft a special WebP
lossless file that triggers the ReadHuffmanCodes()
function to allocate the HuffmanCode buffer with a size that comes from an array of precomputed sizes: kTableSize
. The color_cache_bits
value defines which size to use. The kTableSize
array only takes into account sizes for 8-bit first-level table lookups but not second-level table lookups. libwebp allows codes that are up to 15-bit (MAX_ALLOWED_CODE_LENGTH
). When BuildHuffmanTable() attempts to fill the second-level tables it may write data out-of-bounds. The OOB write to the undersized array happens in ReplicateValue.
Notes:
This is only exploitable if the color_cache_bits
value defines which size to use.
This vulnerability was also published on libwebp CVE-2023-5129
Changelog:
2023-09-12: Initial advisory publication
2023-09-27: Advisory details updated, including CVSS, references
2023-09-27: CVE-2023-5129 rejected as a duplicate of CVE-2023-4863
2023-09-28: Research and addition of additional affected libraries
2024-01-28: Additional fix information
Remediation
Upgrade sharp
to version 0.32.6 or higher.
References
critical severity
- Vulnerable module: hawk
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5 and youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › hawk@3.1.3
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › hawk@3.1.3
Overview
hawk is a library for the HTTP Hawk Authentication Scheme.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Authentication Bypass. The incoming (client supplied) hash of the payload is trusted by the server and not verified before the signature is calculated.
A malicious actor in the middle can alter the payload and the server side will not identify the modification occurred because it simply uses the client provided value instead of verify the hash provided against the modified payload.
According to the maintainers this issue is to be considered out of scope as "payload hash validation is optional and up to developer to implement".
Remediation
There is no fixed version for hawk
.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: pdfjs-dist
- Introduced through: pdfjs-dist@2.10.377
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › pdfjs-dist@2.10.377Remediation: Upgrade to pdfjs-dist@4.2.67.
Overview
pdfjs-dist is a Portable Document Format (PDF) library that is built with HTML5.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection in font_loader.js
, which passes input to the eval()
function when the default isEvalSupported
option is in use. An attacker can execute code by convincing a user to open a malicious PDF file.
Workaround
This vulnerability can be avoided by setting isEvalSupported
to false
.
Remediation
Upgrade pdfjs-dist
to version 4.2.67 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: xmldom
- Introduced through: passport-twitter@1.0.4
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-twitter@1.0.4 › xtraverse@0.1.0 › xmldom@0.1.31
Overview
xmldom is an A pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution through the copy()
function in dom.js
. Exploiting this vulnerability is possible via the p
variable.
DISPUTED This vulnerability has been disputed by the maintainers of the package. Currently the only viable exploit that has been demonstrated is to pollute the target object (rather then the global object which is generally the case for Prototype Pollution vulnerabilities) and it is yet unclear if this limited attack vector exposes any vulnerability in the context of this package.
See the linked GitHub Issue for full details on the discussion around the legitimacy and potential revocation of this vulnerability.
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
There is no fixed version for xmldom
.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: bl
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › bl@1.1.2
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › bl@1.1.2
Overview
bl is a library that allows you to collect buffers and access with a standard readable buffer interface.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure. If user input ends up in consume()
argument and can become negative, BufferList state can be corrupted, tricking it into exposing uninitialized memory via regular .slice()
calls.
PoC by chalker
const { BufferList } = require('bl')
const secret = require('crypto').randomBytes(256)
for (let i = 0; i < 1e6; i++) {
const clone = Buffer.from(secret)
const bl = new BufferList()
bl.append(Buffer.from('a'))
bl.consume(-1024)
const buf = bl.slice(1)
if (buf.indexOf(clone) !== -1) {
console.error(`Match (at ${i})`, buf)
}
}
Remediation
Upgrade bl
to version 2.2.1, 3.0.1, 4.0.3, 1.2.3 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: ansi-regex
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › har-validator@2.0.6 › chalk@1.1.3 › has-ansi@2.0.0 › ansi-regex@2.1.1
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › har-validator@2.0.6 › chalk@1.1.3 › strip-ansi@3.0.1 › ansi-regex@2.1.1
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › har-validator@2.0.6 › chalk@1.1.3 › has-ansi@2.0.0 › ansi-regex@2.1.1
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › har-validator@2.0.6 › chalk@1.1.3 › strip-ansi@3.0.1 › ansi-regex@2.1.1
…and 1 more
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to the sub-patterns [[\\]()#;?]*
and (?:;[-a-zA-Z\\d\\/#&.:=?%@~_]*)*
.
PoC
import ansiRegex from 'ansi-regex';
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = "\u001B["+";".repeat(i*10000);
ansiRegex().test(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 ansi-regex
to version 3.0.1, 4.1.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.1 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution through the zipObjectDeep
function due to improper user input sanitization in the baseZipObject
function.
PoC
lodash.zipobjectdeep:
const zipObjectDeep = require("lodash.zipobjectdeep");
let emptyObject = {};
console.log(`[+] Before prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] Before prototype pollution : undefined
zipObjectDeep(["constructor.prototype.polluted"], [true]);
//we inject our malicious attributes in the vulnerable function
console.log(`[+] After prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] After prototype pollution : true
lodash:
const test = require("lodash");
let emptyObject = {};
console.log(`[+] Before prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] Before prototype pollution : undefined
test.zipObjectDeep(["constructor.prototype.polluted"], [true]);
//we inject our malicious attributes in the vulnerable function
console.log(`[+] After prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] After prototype pollution : true
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.17 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: markdown-it
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › markdown-it@12.3.2
Overview
markdown-it is a modern pluggable markdown parser.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Infinite loop in linkify inline rule when using malformed input.
Remediation
Upgrade markdown-it
to version 13.0.2 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: merge
- Introduced through: watch@1.0.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › watch@1.0.2 › exec-sh@0.2.2 › merge@1.2.1
Overview
merge is a library that allows you to merge multiple objects into one, optionally creating a new cloned object. Similar to the jQuery.extend but more flexible. Works in Node.js and the browser.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The 'merge' function already checks for 'proto' keys in an object to prevent prototype pollution, but does not check for 'constructor' or 'prototype' keys.
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade merge
to version 2.1.0 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: nth-check
- Introduced through: cheerio@1.0.0-rc.3 and juice@6.0.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › cheerio@1.0.0-rc.3 › css-select@1.2.0 › nth-check@1.0.2Remediation: Upgrade to cheerio@1.0.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › juice@6.0.0 › cheerio@0.22.0 › css-select@1.2.0 › nth-check@1.0.2Remediation: Upgrade to juice@7.0.0.
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when parsing crafted invalid CSS nth-checks, due to the sub-pattern \s*(?:([+-]?)\s*(\d+))?
in RE_NTH_ELEMENT
with quantified overlapping adjacency.
PoC
var nthCheck = require("nth-check")
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = '2n' + ' '.repeat(i*10000)+"!";
try {
nthCheck.parse(attack_str)
}
catch(err) {
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 nth-check
to version 2.0.1 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: qs
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5 and slideshare@git://github.com/oaeproject/node-slideshare
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › qs@1.0.2Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › slideshare@git://github.com/oaeproject/node-slideshare › restler@3.4.0 › qs@1.2.0
Overview
qs is a querystring parser that supports nesting and arrays, with a depth limit.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Override Protection Bypass. By default qs
protects against attacks that attempt to overwrite an object's existing prototype properties, such as toString()
, hasOwnProperty()
,etc.
From qs
documentation:
By default parameters that would overwrite properties on the object prototype are ignored, if you wish to keep the data from those fields either use plainObjects as mentioned above, or set allowPrototypes to true which will allow user input to overwrite those properties. WARNING It is generally a bad idea to enable this option as it can cause problems when attempting to use the properties that have been overwritten. Always be careful with this option.
Overwriting these properties can impact application logic, potentially allowing attackers to work around security controls, modify data, make the application unstable and more.
In versions of the package affected by this vulnerability, it is possible to circumvent this protection and overwrite prototype properties and functions by prefixing the name of the parameter with [
or ]
. e.g. qs.parse("]=toString")
will return {toString = true}
, as a result, calling toString()
on the object will throw an exception.
Example:
qs.parse('toString=foo', { allowPrototypes: false })
// {}
qs.parse("]=toString", { allowPrototypes: false })
// {toString = true} <== prototype overwritten
For more information, you can check out our blog.
Disclosure Timeline
- February 13th, 2017 - Reported the issue to package owner.
- February 13th, 2017 - Issue acknowledged by package owner.
- February 16th, 2017 - Partial fix released in versions
6.0.3
,6.1.1
,6.2.2
,6.3.1
. - March 6th, 2017 - Final fix released in versions
6.4.0
,6.3.2
,6.2.3
,6.1.2
and6.0.4
Remediation
Upgrade qs
to version 6.0.4, 6.1.2, 6.2.3, 6.3.2 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: qs
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5, slideshare@git://github.com/oaeproject/node-slideshare and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › qs@1.0.2Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › slideshare@git://github.com/oaeproject/node-slideshare › restler@3.4.0 › qs@1.2.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › qs@6.1.2
Overview
qs is a querystring parser that supports nesting and arrays, with a depth limit.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Poisoning which allows attackers to cause a Node process to hang, processing an Array object whose prototype has been replaced by one with an excessive length value.
Note: In many typical Express use cases, an unauthenticated remote attacker can place the attack payload in the query string of the URL that is used to visit the application, such as a[__proto__]=b&a[__proto__]&a[length]=100000000
.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.
Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.
One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.
When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.
Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:
High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.
Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm
ws
package
Remediation
Upgrade qs
to version 6.2.4, 6.3.3, 6.4.1, 6.5.3, 6.6.1, 6.7.3, 6.8.3, 6.9.7, 6.10.3 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › tough-cookie@2.2.2Remediation: Open PR to patch tough-cookie@2.2.2.
Overview
tough-cookie is a RFC6265 Cookies and CookieJar module for Node.js.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). An attacker can provide a cookie, which nearly matches the pattern being matched. This will cause the regular expression matching to take a long time, all the while occupying the event loop and preventing it from processing other requests and making the server unavailable (a Denial of Service attack).
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- 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 tough-cookie
to version 2.3.0 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: hawk
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5 and youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › hawk@3.1.3
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › hawk@3.1.3
Overview
hawk is a library for the HTTP Hawk Authentication Scheme.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in header parsing where each added character in the attacker's input increases the computation time exponentially.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- 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 hawk
to version 9.0.1 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The function defaultsDeep
could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype
using a constructor
payload.
PoC by Snyk
const mergeFn = require('lodash').defaultsDeep;
const payload = '{"constructor": {"prototype": {"a0": true}}}'
function check() {
mergeFn({}, JSON.parse(payload));
if (({})[`a0`] === true) {
console.log(`Vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via ${payload}`);
}
}
check();
For more information, check out our blog post
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.12 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the set
and setwith
functions due to improper user input sanitization.
PoC
lod = require('lodash')
lod.set({}, "__proto__[test2]", "456")
console.log(Object.prototype)
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.17 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The functions merge
, mergeWith
, and defaultsDeep
could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype
. This is due to an incomplete fix to CVE-2018-3721
.
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.11 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: merge
- Introduced through: watch@1.0.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › watch@1.0.2 › exec-sh@0.2.2 › merge@1.2.1
Overview
merge is a library that allows you to merge multiple objects into one, optionally creating a new cloned object. Similar to the jQuery.extend but more flexible. Works in Node.js and the browser.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via _recursiveMerge
.
PoC:
const merge = require('merge');
const payload2 = JSON.parse('{"x": {"__proto__":{"polluted":"yes"}}}');
let obj1 = {x: {y:1}};
console.log("Before : " + obj1.polluted);
merge.recursive(obj1, payload2);
console.log("After : " + obj1.polluted);
console.log("After : " + {}.polluted);
Output:
Before : undefined
After : yes
After : yes
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade merge
to version 2.1.1 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: node-forge
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › google-p12-pem@0.1.2 › node-forge@0.7.6Remediation: Upgrade to youtube-api@3.0.0.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature due to RSA's PKCS#1
v1.5 signature verification code which does not check for tailing garbage bytes after decoding a DigestInfo
ASN.1 structure. This can allow padding bytes to be removed and garbage data added to forge a signature when a low public exponent is being used.
Remediation
Upgrade node-forge
to version 1.3.0 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: node-forge
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › google-p12-pem@0.1.2 › node-forge@0.7.6Remediation: Upgrade to youtube-api@3.0.0.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the util.setPath
function.
Note: version 0.10.0 is a breaking change removing the vulnerable functions.
POC:
const nodeforge = require('node-forge');
var obj = {};
nodeforge.util.setPath(obj, ['__proto__', 'polluted'], true);
console.log(polluted);
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade node-forge
to version 0.10.0 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
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
high severity
- Vulnerable module: base64url
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › gapitoken@0.1.5 › jws@3.0.0 › base64url@1.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › jws@3.0.0 › base64url@1.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › gapitoken@0.1.5 › jws@3.0.0 › jwa@1.0.2 › base64url@0.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › jws@3.0.0 › jwa@1.0.2 › base64url@0.0.6
…and 1 more
Overview
base64url Converting to, and from, base64url.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure. An attacker could extract sensitive data from uninitialized memory or may cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by passing in a large number, in setups where typed user input can be passed (e.g. from JSON).
Details
The Buffer class on Node.js is a mutable array of binary data, and can be initialized with a string, array or number.
const buf1 = new Buffer([1,2,3]);
// creates a buffer containing [01, 02, 03]
const buf2 = new Buffer('test');
// creates a buffer containing ASCII bytes [74, 65, 73, 74]
const buf3 = new Buffer(10);
// creates a buffer of length 10
The first two variants simply create a binary representation of the value it received. The last one, however, pre-allocates a buffer of the specified size, making it a useful buffer, especially when reading data from a stream.
When using the number constructor of Buffer, it will allocate the memory, but will not fill it with zeros. Instead, the allocated buffer will hold whatever was in memory at the time. If the buffer is not zeroed
by using buf.fill(0)
, it may leak sensitive information like keys, source code, and system info.
Remediation
Upgrade base64url
to version 3.0.0 or higher.
Note This is vulnerable only for Node <=4
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: http-signature
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › http-signature@0.10.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
Overview
http-signature
is a reference implementation of Joyent's HTTP Signature scheme.
Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Timing Attacks due to time-variable comparison of signatures.
The library implemented a character to character comparison, similar to the built-in string comparison mechanism, ===
, and not a time constant string comparison. As a result, the comparison will fail faster when the first characters in the signature are incorrect.
An attacker can use this difference to perform a timing attack, essentially allowing them to guess the signature one character at a time.
You can read more about timing attacks in Node.js on the Snyk blog.
Remediation
Upgrade http-signature
to version 1.0.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: request
- Introduced through: request@2.88.2, juice@6.0.0 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › juice@6.0.0 › web-resource-inliner@4.3.4 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-openid@0.4.0 › openid@1.0.4 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › gapitoken@0.1.5 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0
…and 5 more
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
- Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
- Introduced through: request@2.88.2, juice@6.0.0 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › juice@6.0.0 › web-resource-inliner@4.3.4 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-openid@0.4.0 › openid@1.0.4 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › gapitoken@0.1.5 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › tough-cookie@3.0.1Remediation: Upgrade to tough-cookie@4.1.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › tough-cookie@2.3.4
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › tough-cookie@2.2.2
…and 5 more
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
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
- Vulnerable module: xmldom
- Introduced through: passport-twitter@1.0.4
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-twitter@1.0.4 › xtraverse@0.1.0 › xmldom@0.1.31
Overview
xmldom is an A pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Input Validation. It does not correctly escape special characters when serializing elements are removed from their ancestor. This may lead to unexpected syntactic changes during XML processing in some downstream applications.
Note: Customers who use "xmldom" package, should use "@xmldom/xmldom" instead, as "xmldom" is no longer maintained.
Remediation
There is no fixed version for xmldom
.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: hoek
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5 and youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1 › hoek@0.9.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1 › boom@0.4.2 › hoek@0.9.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1 › sntp@0.2.4 › hoek@0.9.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1 › cryptiles@0.2.2 › boom@0.4.2 › hoek@0.9.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › boom@2.10.1 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › sntp@1.0.9 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › cryptiles@2.0.5 › boom@2.10.1 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › boom@2.10.1 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › sntp@1.0.9 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › hawk@3.1.3 › cryptiles@2.0.5 › boom@2.10.1 › hoek@2.16.3Remediation: Open PR to patch hoek@2.16.3.
…and 9 more
Overview
hoek is an Utility methods for the hapi ecosystem.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The utilities function allow modification of the Object
prototype. If an attacker can control part of the structure passed to this function, they could add or modify an existing property.
PoC by Olivier Arteau (HoLyVieR)
var Hoek = require('hoek');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"oops":"It works !"}}';
var a = {};
console.log("Before : " + a.oops);
Hoek.merge({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log("After : " + a.oops);
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 hoek
to version 4.2.1, 5.0.3 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1Remediation: Open PR to patch lodash@3.10.1.
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The utilities function allow modification of the Object
prototype. If an attacker can control part of the structure passed to this function, they could add or modify an existing property.
PoC by Olivier Arteau (HoLyVieR)
var _= require('lodash');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"oops":"It works !"}}';
var a = {};
console.log("Before : " + a.oops);
_.merge({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log("After : " + a.oops);
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.5 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: node-forge
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › google-p12-pem@0.1.2 › node-forge@0.7.6Remediation: Upgrade to youtube-api@3.0.0.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the forge.debug
API if called with untrusted input.
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade node-forge
to version 1.0.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: inflight
- Introduced through: rimraf@3.0.2, puppeteer@3.3.0 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › rimraf@3.0.2 › glob@7.2.3 › inflight@1.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › puppeteer@3.3.0 › rimraf@3.0.2 › glob@7.2.3 › inflight@1.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › temp@0.9.4 › rimraf@2.6.3 › glob@7.2.3 › inflight@1.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › bunyan@1.8.15 › mv@2.1.1 › rimraf@2.4.5 › glob@6.0.4 › inflight@1.0.6
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-ldapauth@2.1.4 › ldapauth-fork@4.3.3 › ldapjs@1.0.2 › bunyan@1.8.15 › mv@2.1.1 › rimraf@2.4.5 › glob@6.0.4 › inflight@1.0.6
…and 2 more
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: marked
- Introduced through: marked@0.8.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › marked@0.8.2Remediation: Upgrade to marked@1.1.1.
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The em
regex within src/rules.js
file have multiple unused capture groups which could lead to a denial of service attack if user input is reachable.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 1.1.1 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › tough-cookie@2.2.2Remediation: Open PR to patch tough-cookie@2.2.2.
Overview
tough-cookie
is RFC6265 Cookies and Cookie Jar for node.js.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks. An attacker may pass a specially crafted cookie, causing the server to hang.
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 to version 2.3.3
or newer.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: minimist
- Introduced through: optimist@0.6.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › optimist@0.6.1 › minimist@0.0.10
Overview
minimist is a parse argument options module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The library could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype
using a constructor
or __proto__
payload.
PoC by Snyk
require('minimist')('--__proto__.injected0 value0'.split(' '));
console.log(({}).injected0 === 'value0'); // true
require('minimist')('--constructor.prototype.injected1 value1'.split(' '));
console.log(({}).injected1 === 'value1'); // true
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade minimist
to version 0.2.1, 1.2.3 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: node-forge
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › google-p12-pem@0.1.2 › node-forge@0.7.6Remediation: Upgrade to youtube-api@3.0.0.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature due to RSA's PKCS#1 v1.5
signature verification code which does not properly check DigestInfo
for a proper ASN.1
structure. This can lead to successful verification with signatures that contain invalid structures but a valid digest.
Remediation
Upgrade node-forge
to version 1.3.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: node-forge
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › google-p12-pem@0.1.2 › node-forge@0.7.6Remediation: Upgrade to youtube-api@3.0.0.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature due to RSAs
PKCS#1` v1.5 signature verification code which is lenient in checking the digest algorithm structure. This can allow a crafted structure that steals padding bytes and uses unchecked portion of the PKCS#1 encoded message to forge a signature when a low public exponent is being used.
Remediation
Upgrade node-forge
to version 1.3.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: underscore
- Introduced through: awssum@1.2.0, awssum-amazon@1.4.0 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › awssum@1.2.0 › underscore@1.4.4
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › awssum-amazon@1.4.0 › underscore@1.4.4
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › awssum-amazon-s3@1.5.0 › underscore@1.4.4
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › etherpad-lite-client@0.8.0 › underscore@1.3.3
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl › underscore@1.6.0
…and 2 more
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
- Vulnerable module: xmldom
- Introduced through: passport-twitter@1.0.4
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-twitter@1.0.4 › xtraverse@0.1.0 › xmldom@0.1.31
Overview
xmldom is an A pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) Injection. Does not correctly preserve system identifiers, FPIs or namespaces when repeatedly parsing and serializing maliciously crafted documents.
Details
XXE Injection is a type of attack against an application that parses XML input. XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. By default, many XML processors allow specification of an external entity, a URI that is dereferenced and evaluated during XML processing. When an XML document is being parsed, the parser can make a request and include the content at the specified URI inside of the XML document.
Attacks can include disclosing local files, which may contain sensitive data such as passwords or private user data, using file: schemes or relative paths in the system identifier.
For example, below is a sample XML document, containing an XML element- username.
<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<username>John</username>
</xml>
An external XML entity - xxe
, is defined using a system identifier and present within a DOCTYPE header. These entities can access local or remote content. For example the below code contains an external XML entity that would fetch the content of /etc/passwd
and display it to the user rendered by username
.
<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE foo [
<!ENTITY xxe SYSTEM "file:///etc/passwd" >]>
<username>&xxe;</username>
</xml>
Other XXE Injection attacks can access local resources that may not stop returning data, possibly impacting application availability and leading to Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade xmldom
to version 0.5.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
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: marked
- Introduced through: marked@0.8.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › marked@0.8.2Remediation: Upgrade to marked@4.0.10.
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when passing unsanitized user input to inline.reflinkSearch
, if it is not being parsed by a time-limited worker thread.
PoC
import * as marked from 'marked';
console.log(marked.parse(`[x]: x
\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](`));
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 4.0.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: marked@0.8.2
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › marked@0.8.2Remediation: Upgrade to marked@4.0.10.
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when unsanitized user input is passed to block.def
.
PoC
import * as marked from "marked";
marked.parse(`[x]:${' '.repeat(1500)}x ${' '.repeat(1500)} x`);
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 4.0.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: node-forge
- Introduced through: youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › gtoken@1.2.3 › google-p12-pem@0.1.2 › node-forge@0.7.6Remediation: Upgrade to youtube-api@3.0.0.
Overview
node-forge is a JavaScript implementations of network transports, cryptography, ciphers, PKI, message digests, and various utilities.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Open Redirect via parseUrl
function when it mishandles certain uses of backslash such as https:/\/\/\
and interprets the URI as a relative path.
PoC:
// poc.js
var forge = require("node-forge");
var url = forge.util.parseUrl("https:/\/\/\www.github.com/foo/bar");
console.log(url);
// Output of node poc.js:
{
full: 'https://',
scheme: 'https',
host: '',
port: 443,
path: '/www.github.com/foo/bar', <<<---- path should be "/foo/bar"
fullHost: ''
}
Remediation
Upgrade node-forge
to version 1.0.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: xml2js
- Introduced through: awssum@1.2.0, passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › awssum@1.2.0 › xml2js@0.2.8
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl › xml2js@0.4.4
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › slideshare@git://github.com/oaeproject/node-slideshare › restler@3.4.0 › xml2js@0.4.0
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › xml2js@0.4.23Remediation: Upgrade to xml2js@0.5.0.
…and 1 more
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
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
- Vulnerable module: request
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
Overview
request is a simplified http request client.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Remote Memory Exposure.
A potential remote memory exposure vulnerability exists in request
. If a request
uses a multipart attachment and the body type option is number
with value X, then X bytes of uninitialized memory will be sent in the body of the request.
Note that while the impact of this vulnerability is high (memory exposure), exploiting it is likely difficult, as the attacker needs to somehow control the body type of the request. One potential exploit scenario is when a request is composed based on JSON input, including the body type, allowing a malicious JSON to trigger the memory leak.
Details
Constructing a Buffer
class with integer N
creates a Buffer
of length N
with non zero-ed out memory.
Example:
var x = new Buffer(100); // uninitialized Buffer of length 100
// vs
var x = new Buffer('100'); // initialized Buffer with value of '100'
Initializing a multipart body in such manner will cause uninitialized memory to be sent in the body of the request.
Proof of concept
var http = require('http')
var request = require('request')
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
var data = ''
req.setEncoding('utf8')
req.on('data', function (chunk) {
console.log('data')
data += chunk
})
req.on('end', function () {
// this will print uninitialized memory from the client
console.log('Client sent:\n', data)
})
res.end()
}).listen(8000)
request({
method: 'POST',
uri: 'http://localhost:8000',
multipart: [{ body: 1000 }]
},
function (err, res, body) {
if (err) return console.error('upload failed:', err)
console.log('sent')
})
Remediation
Upgrade request
to version 2.68.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: tunnel-agent
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5 and youtube-api@2.0.10
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › tunnel-agent@0.4.3Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › request@2.72.0 › tunnel-agent@0.4.3Remediation: Open PR to patch tunnel-agent@0.4.3.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › youtube-api@2.0.10 › googleapis@5.2.1 › google-auth-library@0.9.10 › request@2.74.0 › tunnel-agent@0.4.3Remediation: Open PR to patch tunnel-agent@0.4.3.
Overview
tunnel-agent
is HTTP proxy tunneling agent. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure.
A possible memory disclosure vulnerability exists when a value of type number
is used to set the proxy.auth option of a request request
and results in a possible uninitialized memory exposures in the request body.
This is a result of unobstructed use of the Buffer
constructor, whose insecure default constructor increases the odds of memory leakage.
Details
Constructing a Buffer
class with integer N
creates a Buffer
of length N
with raw (not "zero-ed") memory.
In the following example, the first call would allocate 100 bytes of memory, while the second example will allocate the memory needed for the string "100":
// uninitialized Buffer of length 100
x = new Buffer(100);
// initialized Buffer with value of '100'
x = new Buffer('100');
tunnel-agent
's request
construction uses the default Buffer
constructor as-is, making it easy to append uninitialized memory to an existing list. If the value of the buffer list is exposed to users, it may expose raw server side memory, potentially holding secrets, private data and code. This is a similar vulnerability to the infamous Heartbleed
flaw in OpenSSL.
Proof of concept by ChALkeR
require('request')({
method: 'GET',
uri: 'http://www.example.com',
tunnel: true,
proxy:{
protocol: 'http:',
host:"127.0.0.1",
port:8080,
auth:80
}
});
You can read more about the insecure Buffer
behavior on our blog.
Similar vulnerabilities were discovered in request, mongoose, ws and sequelize.
Remediation
Upgrade tunnel-agent
to version 0.6.0 or higher.
Note This is vulnerable only for Node <=4
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: passport
- Introduced through: passport@0.4.1 and passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport@0.4.1Remediation: Upgrade to passport@0.6.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl › passport@0.1.18
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
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: dox@0.9.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dox@0.9.1 › jsdoctypeparser@1.2.0 › lodash@3.10.1
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). It parses dates using regex strings, which may cause a slowdown of 2 seconds per 50k characters.
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 4.17.11 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: node-uuid
- Introduced through: passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › passport-cas@git://github.com/oaeproject/passport-cas#samlValidateLoginUrl › node-uuid@1.4.1
Overview
node-uuid
is a Simple, fast generation of RFC4122 UUIDS.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Insecure Randomness. It uses the cryptographically insecure Math.random
which can produce predictable values and should not be used in security-sensitive context.
Remediation
Upgrade node-uuid
to version 1.4.4 or greater.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: clean-css
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › clean-css@2.2.23Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.0.0.
Overview
clean-css is a fast and efficient CSS optimizer for Node.js platform and any modern browser.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). attacks. This can cause an impact of about 10 seconds matching time for data 70k characters long.
Disclosure Timeline
- Feb 15th, 2018 - Initial Disclosure to package owner
- Feb 20th, 2018 - Initial Response from package owner
- Mar 6th, 2018 - Fix issued
- Mar 7th, 2018 - Vulnerability published
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 clean-css
to version 4.1.11 or higher.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: hawk
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › hawk@1.1.1Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
Overview
hawk
is an HTTP authentication scheme using a message authentication code (MAC) algorithm to provide partial HTTP request cryptographic verification.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks.
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.
You can read more about Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)
on our blog.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: mime
- Introduced through: less@1.7.5
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › mime@1.2.11Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › less@1.7.5 › request@2.40.0 › form-data@0.1.4 › mime@1.2.11Remediation: Upgrade to less@2.1.0.
Overview
mime is a comprehensive, compact MIME type module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). It uses regex the following regex /.*[\.\/\\]/
in its lookup, which can cause a slowdown of 2 seconds for 50k characters.
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 mime
to version 1.4.1, 2.0.3 or higher.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: minimist
- Introduced through: optimist@0.6.1
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › optimist@0.6.1 › minimist@0.0.10
Overview
minimist is a parse argument options module.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to a missing handler to Function.prototype
.
Notes:
This vulnerability is a bypass to CVE-2020-7598
The reason for the different CVSS between CVE-2021-44906 to CVE-2020-7598, is that CVE-2020-7598 can pollute objects, while CVE-2021-44906 can pollute only function.
PoC by Snyk
require('minimist')('--_.constructor.constructor.prototype.foo bar'.split(' '));
console.log((function(){}).foo); // bar
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 mergeProperty 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
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade minimist
to version 0.2.4, 1.2.6 or higher.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: dompurify
- Introduced through: dompurify@2.5.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: hilary@oaeproject/Hilary#6496d9e9b13635d88fd2e6f0bd3891ebb943d2c7 › dompurify@2.5.8Remediation: Upgrade to dompurify@3.2.4.
Overview
dompurify is a DOM-only XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) due to incorrect handling of template literals in regular expressions. An attacker can manipulate the output of the script by injecting malicious payloads that bypass the dompurify
sanitization.
PoC
DOMPurify.sanitize(
`<math><foo-test><mi><li><table><foo-test><li></li></foo-test><a>
<style>
<! \${
</style>
}
<foo-b id="><img src onerror='alert(1)'>">hmm...</foo-b>
</a></table></li></mi></foo-test></math>
`,
{
SAFE_FOR_TEMPLATES: true,
CUSTOM_ELEMENT_HANDLING: {
tagNameCheck: /^foo-/,
},
}
);
Details
A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.
This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.
Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.
Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, <
can be coded as <
; and >
can be coded as >
; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses <
and >
as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.
The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Description |
---|---|---|
Stored | Server | The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link. |
Reflected | Server | The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser. |
DOM-based | Client | The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data. |
Mutated | The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:
- Web servers
- Application servers
- Web application environments
How to prevent
This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:
- Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
- Convert special characters such as
?
,&
,/
,<
,>
and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents. - Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
- Redirect invalid requests.
- Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
- Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
- Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.
Remediation
Upgrade dompurify
to version 3.2.4 or higher.