Vulnerabilities

39 via 76 paths

Dependencies

395

Source

GitHub

Commit

0dc2e45d

Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

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critical severity

SQL Injection

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@6.19.1.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to SQL Injection via the replacements statement. It allowed a malicious actor to pass dangerous values such as OR true; DROP TABLE users through replacements which would result in arbitrary SQL execution.

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 6.19.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Arbitrary File Write

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic was insufficient when extracting tar files that contained both a directory and a symlink with the same name as the directory, where the symlink and directory names in the archive entry used backslashes as a path separator on posix systems. The cache checking logic used both \ and / characters as path separators. However, \ is a valid filename character on posix systems.

By first creating a directory, and then replacing that directory with a symlink, it is possible to bypass node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location. This can lead to extracting arbitrary files into that location, thus allowing arbitrary file creation and overwrite.

Additionally, a similar confusion could arise on case-insensitive filesystems. If a tar archive contained a directory at FOO, followed by a symbolic link named foo, then on case-insensitive file systems, the creation of the symbolic link would remove the directory from the filesystem, but not from the internal directory cache, as it would not be treated as a cache hit. A subsequent file entry within the FOO directory would then be placed in the target of the symbolic link, thinking that the directory had already been created.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.7, 5.0.8, 4.4.16 or higher.

References

high severity

Arbitrary File Write

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic is insufficient when extracting tar files that contain two directories and a symlink with names containing unicode values that normalized to the same value. Additionally, on Windows systems, long path portions would resolve to the same file system entities as their 8.3 "short path" counterparts. A specially crafted tar archive can include directories with two forms of the path that resolve to the same file system entity, followed by a symbolic link with a name in the first form, lastly followed by a file using the second form. This leads to bypassing node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location and extracting arbitrary files into that location.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.9, 5.0.10, 4.4.18 or higher.

References

high severity

Arbitrary File Write

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Write. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be outside of the extraction target directory is not extracted. This is, in part, accomplished by sanitizing absolute paths of entries within the archive, skipping archive entries that contain .. path portions, and resolving the sanitized paths against the extraction target directory.

This logic is insufficient on Windows systems when extracting tar files that contain a path that is not an absolute path, but specify a drive letter different from the extraction target, such as C:some\path. If the drive letter does not match the extraction target, for example D:\extraction\dir, then the result of path.resolve(extractionDirectory, entryPath) resolves against the current working directory on the C: drive, rather than the extraction target directory.

Additionally, a .. portion of the path can occur immediately after the drive letter, such as C:../foo, and is not properly sanitized by the logic that checks for .. within the normalized and split portions of the path.

Note: This only affects users of node-tar on Windows systems.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.9, 5.0.10, 4.4.18 or higher.

References

high severity

Improper Filtering of Special Elements

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@6.29.0.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Filtering of Special Elements due to attributes not being escaped if they included ( and ), or were equal to * and were split if they included the character ..

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 6.29.0 or higher.

References

high severity

Arbitrary File Overwrite

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Overwrite. This is due to insufficient symlink protection. node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be modified by a symbolic link is not extracted. This is, in part, achieved by ensuring that extracted directories are not symlinks. Additionally, in order to prevent unnecessary stat calls to determine whether a given path is a directory, paths are cached when directories are created.

This logic is insufficient when extracting tar files that contain both a directory and a symlink with the same name as the directory. This order of operations results in the directory being created and added to the node-tar directory cache. When a directory is present in the directory cache, subsequent calls to mkdir for that directory are skipped. However, this is also where node-tar checks for symlinks occur. By first creating a directory, and then replacing that directory with a symlink, it is possible to bypass node-tar symlink checks on directories, essentially allowing an untrusted tar file to symlink into an arbitrary location and subsequently extracting arbitrary files into that location.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 3.2.3, 4.4.15, 5.0.7, 6.1.2 or higher.

References

high severity

Arbitrary File Overwrite

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary File Overwrite. This is due to insufficient absolute path sanitization.

node-tar aims to prevent extraction of absolute file paths by turning absolute paths into relative paths when the preservePaths flag is not set to true. This is achieved by stripping the absolute path root from any absolute file paths contained in a tar file. For example, the path /home/user/.bashrc would turn into home/user/.bashrc.

This logic is insufficient when file paths contain repeated path roots such as ////home/user/.bashrc. node-tar only strips a single path root from such paths. When given an absolute file path with repeating path roots, the resulting path (e.g. ///home/user/.bashrc) still resolves to an absolute path.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 3.2.2, 4.4.14, 5.0.6, 6.1.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: ajv
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 har-validator@4.2.1 ajv@4.11.8
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.

Overview

ajv is an Another JSON Schema Validator

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. A carefully crafted JSON schema could be provided that allows execution of other code by prototype pollution. (While untrusted schemas are recommended against, the worst case of an untrusted schema should be a denial of service, not execution of code.)

Details

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

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

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

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

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

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

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

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

Upgrade ajv to version 6.12.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ansi-regex
  • Introduced through: pretty-error@2.1.2 and sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 pretty-error@2.1.2 renderkid@2.0.7 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to pretty-error@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 npmlog@4.1.2 gauge@2.7.4 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 npmlog@4.1.2 gauge@2.7.4 string-width@1.0.2 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1

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:

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade ansi-regex to version 3.0.1, 4.1.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: dottie
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1 dottie@1.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@4.0.0.

Overview

dottie is a Fast and safe nested object access and manipulation in JavaScript

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to insufficient checks, via the set() function and the current variable in the /dottie.js file.

PoC

var dottie = require("dottie")


var obj1 = {}
var obj2 = {}

var bad_path1 = '__proto__.test1'
var bad_path2 = '__proto__.test2'
console.log("before:"+ obj1.test1)
console.log("before:"+ obj2.test2)
dottie.default(obj1,bad_path1,"polluted1")
dottie.set(obj2,bad_path2,"polluted2")
console.log("after:"+obj1.test1)
console.log("after:"+obj2.test2)

Details

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

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

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

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

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

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

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

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

Upgrade dottie to version 2.0.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0 loader-utils@0.2.17
    Remediation: Upgrade to isomorphic-style-loader@2.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution in parseQuery function via the name variable in parseQuery.js. This pollutes the prototype of the object returned by parseQuery and not the global Object prototype (which is the commonly understood definition of Prototype Pollution). Therefore, the actual impact will depend on how applications utilize the returned object and how they filter unwanted 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 merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

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

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

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

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

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

Upgrade loader-utils to version 1.4.1, 2.0.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: sqlite3
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@5.0.3.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) which will invoke the toString function of the passed parameter. If passed an invalid Function object it will throw and crash the V8 engine.

PoC

let sqlite3 = require('sqlite3').verbose(); 
let db = new sqlite3.Database(':memory:'); 
db.serialize(function() { 
  db.run("CREATE TABLE lorem (info TEXT)"); 
  db.run("INSERT INTO lorem VALUES (?)", [{toString: 23}]);  
});

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 sqlite3 to version 5.0.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Authorization Bypass

  • Vulnerable module: express-jwt
  • Introduced through: express-jwt@5.3.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 express-jwt@5.3.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to express-jwt@6.0.0.

Overview

express-jwt is a JWT authentication middleware.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Authorization Bypass. The algorithms entry to be specified in the configuration is not being enforced. When algorithms is not specified in the configuration, with the combination of jwks-rsa, it may lead to authorization bypass.

Remediation

Upgrade express-jwt to version 6.0.0 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: hawk
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 hawk@3.1.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@5.0.3.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 hawk@3.1.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.

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:

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade hawk to version 9.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: lodash.set
  • Introduced through: express-jwt@5.3.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 express-jwt@5.3.3 lodash.set@4.3.2

Overview

lodash.set is a lodash method _.set exported as a Node.js module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the set and setwith functions due to improper user input sanitization.

Note

lodash.set is not maintained for a long time. It is recommended to use lodash library, which contains the fix since version 4.17.17.

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 merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

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

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

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

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

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

There is no fixed version for lodash.set.

References

high severity

Hash Injection

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@4.12.0.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Hash Injection. Using specially crafted requests an attacker can bypass secret_token protections on websites using sequalize.

For example:

db.Token.findOne({
      where: {
        token: req.query.token
      }
);

Node.js and other platforms allow nested parameters, i.e. token[$gt]=1 will be transformed into token = {"$gt":1}. When such a hash is passed into sequalize it will consider it a query (greater than 1) and find the first token in the DB, bypassing security of this endpoint.

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 4.12.0 or higher.

References

high severity

SQL Injection

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@6.21.2.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to SQL Injection due to an improper escaping for multiple appearances of $ in a string.

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 6.21.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm

  • Vulnerable module: jsonwebtoken
  • Introduced through: express-jwt@5.3.3 and jsonwebtoken@7.4.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 express-jwt@5.3.3 jsonwebtoken@8.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to express-jwt@8.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 jsonwebtoken@7.4.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to jsonwebtoken@9.0.0.

Overview

jsonwebtoken is a JSON Web Token implementation (symmetric and asymmetric)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm such that the library can be misconfigured to use legacy, insecure key types for signature verification. For example, DSA keys could be used with the RS256 algorithm.

Exploitability

Users are affected when using an algorithm and a key type other than the combinations mentioned below:

EC: ES256, ES384, ES512

RSA: RS256, RS384, RS512, PS256, PS384, PS512

RSA-PSS: PS256, PS384, PS512

And for Elliptic Curve algorithms:

ES256: prime256v1

ES384: secp384r1

ES512: secp521r1

Workaround

Users who are unable to upgrade to the fixed version can use the allowInvalidAsymmetricKeyTypes option to true in the sign() and verify() functions to continue usage of invalid key type/algorithm combination in 9.0.0 for legacy compatibility.

Remediation

Upgrade jsonwebtoken to version 9.0.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Improper Restriction of Security Token Assignment

  • Vulnerable module: jsonwebtoken
  • Introduced through: express-jwt@5.3.3 and jsonwebtoken@7.4.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 express-jwt@5.3.3 jsonwebtoken@8.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to express-jwt@8.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 jsonwebtoken@7.4.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to jsonwebtoken@9.0.0.

Overview

jsonwebtoken is a JSON Web Token implementation (symmetric and asymmetric)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Restriction of Security Token Assignment via the secretOrPublicKey argument due to misconfigurations of the key retrieval function jwt.verify(). Exploiting this vulnerability might result in incorrect verification of forged tokens when tokens signed with an asymmetric public key could be verified with a symmetric HS256 algorithm.

Note: This vulnerability affects your application if it supports the usage of both symmetric and asymmetric keys in jwt.verify() implementation with the same key retrieval function.

Remediation

Upgrade jsonwebtoken to version 9.0.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Information Exposure

  • Vulnerable module: node-fetch
  • Introduced through: node-fetch@1.7.3, react@15.7.0 and others

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to node-fetch@2.6.7.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 react@15.7.0 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to react@16.5.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 react-dom@15.7.0 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to react-dom@16.5.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 react-tap-event-plugin@2.0.1 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 material-ui@0.18.7 react-event-listener@0.4.5 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 material-ui@0.18.7 recompose@0.24.0 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3

Overview

node-fetch is a light-weight module that brings window.fetch to node.js

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure when fetching a remote url with Cookie, if it get a Location response header, it will follow that url and try to fetch that url with provided cookie. This can lead to forwarding secure headers to 3th party.

Remediation

Upgrade node-fetch to version 2.6.7, 3.1.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF)

  • Vulnerable module: request
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0

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

Denial of Service (DoS)

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@4.44.4.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The afterResults function for the SQLite dialect fails to catch a TypeError exception for the results variable. This allows attackers to submit malicious input that forces the exception and crashes the Node process.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 4.44.4 or higher.

References

medium severity

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption ('Resource Exhaustion')

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled Resource Consumption ('Resource Exhaustion') due to the lack of folders count validation during the folder creation process. An attacker who generates a large number of sub-folders can consume memory on the system running the software and even crash the client within few seconds of running it using a path with too many sub-folders inside.

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.2.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 tough-cookie@2.3.4

Overview

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

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

PoC

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

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

Details

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

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

  • Unsafe Object recursive merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

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

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

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

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

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

Upgrade tough-cookie to version 4.1.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: json5
  • Introduced through: isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0 loader-utils@0.2.17 json5@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to isomorphic-style-loader@2.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the parse method , which does not restrict parsing of keys named __proto__, allowing specially crafted strings to pollute the prototype of the resulting object. This pollutes the prototype of the object returned by JSON5.parse and not the global Object prototype (which is the commonly understood definition of Prototype Pollution). Therefore, the actual impact will depend on how applications utilize the returned object and how they filter unwanted 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 merge

  • Property definition by path

Unsafe Object recursive merge

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

merge (target, source)

  foreach property of source

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

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

    else

      target[property] = source[property]

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

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

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

Property definition by path

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

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

Types of attacks

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

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

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:

  • Application server

  • Web server

  • Web browser

How to prevent

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

  2. Require schema validation of JSON input.

  3. Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.

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

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

For more information on this vulnerability type:

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

Remediation

Upgrade json5 to version 1.0.2, 2.2.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Improper Authentication

  • Vulnerable module: jsonwebtoken
  • Introduced through: express-jwt@5.3.3 and jsonwebtoken@7.4.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 express-jwt@5.3.3 jsonwebtoken@8.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to express-jwt@8.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 jsonwebtoken@7.4.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to jsonwebtoken@9.0.0.

Overview

jsonwebtoken is a JSON Web Token implementation (symmetric and asymmetric)

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Authentication such that the lack of algorithm definition in the jwt.verify() function can lead to signature validation bypass due to defaulting to the none algorithm for signature verification.

Exploitability

Users are affected only if all of the following conditions are true for the jwt.verify() function:

  1. A token with no signature is received.

  2. No algorithms are specified.

  3. A falsy (e.g., null, false, undefined) secret or key is passed.

Remediation

Upgrade jsonwebtoken to version 9.0.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: hoek
  • Introduced through: jsonwebtoken@7.4.3 and sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 jsonwebtoken@7.4.3 joi@6.10.1 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to jsonwebtoken@8.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 jsonwebtoken@7.4.3 joi@6.10.1 topo@1.1.0 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to jsonwebtoken@8.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 hawk@3.1.3 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@5.0.3.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 hawk@3.1.3 boom@2.10.1 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@5.0.3.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 hawk@3.1.3 sntp@1.0.9 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@5.0.3.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 hawk@3.1.3 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 hawk@3.1.3 cryptiles@2.0.5 boom@2.10.1 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@5.0.3.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 hawk@3.1.3 boom@2.10.1 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 hawk@3.1.3 sntp@1.0.9 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 request@2.81.0 hawk@3.1.3 cryptiles@2.0.5 boom@2.10.1 hoek@2.16.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.

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:

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade hoek to version 4.2.1, 5.0.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion')

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@6.28.1.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion') due to improper user-input sanitization, due to unsafe fall-through in GET WHERE conditions.

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 6.28.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime

  • Vulnerable module: inflight
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2 fstream@1.0.12 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 fstream@1.0.12 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2 fstream@1.0.12 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 fstream-ignore@1.0.5 fstream@1.0.12 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime via the makeres function due to improperly deleting keys from the reqs object after execution of callbacks. This behavior causes the keys to remain in the reqs object, which leads to resource exhaustion.

Exploiting this vulnerability results in crashing the node process or in the application crash.

Note: This library is not maintained, and currently, there is no fix for this issue. To overcome this vulnerability, several dependent packages have eliminated the use of this library.

To trigger the memory leak, an attacker would need to have the ability to execute or influence the asynchronous operations that use the inflight module within the application. This typically requires access to the internal workings of the server or application, which is not commonly exposed to remote users. Therefore, “Attack vector” is marked as “Local”.

PoC

const inflight = require('inflight');

function testInflight() {
  let i = 0;
  function scheduleNext() {
    let key = `key-${i++}`;
    const callback = () => {
    };
    for (let j = 0; j < 1000000; j++) {
      inflight(key, callback);
    }

    setImmediate(scheduleNext);
  }


  if (i % 100 === 0) {
    console.log(process.memoryUsage());
  }

  scheduleNext();
}

testInflight();

Remediation

There is no fixed version for inflight.

References

medium severity

Denial of Service

  • Vulnerable module: node-fetch
  • Introduced through: node-fetch@1.7.3, react@15.7.0 and others

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to node-fetch@2.6.1.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 react@15.7.0 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to react@16.5.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 react-dom@15.7.0 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to react-dom@16.5.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 react-tap-event-plugin@2.0.1 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 material-ui@0.18.7 react-event-listener@0.4.5 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 material-ui@0.18.7 recompose@0.24.0 fbjs@0.8.18 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3

Overview

node-fetch is a light-weight module that brings window.fetch to node.js

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service. Node Fetch did not honor the size option after following a redirect, which means that when a content size was over the limit, a FetchError would never get thrown and the process would end without failure.

Remediation

Upgrade node-fetch to version 2.6.1, 3.0.0-beta.9 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0 loader-utils@0.2.17
    Remediation: Upgrade to isomorphic-style-loader@2.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the resourcePath variable in interpolateName.js.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade loader-utils to version 1.4.2, 2.0.4, 3.2.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 isomorphic-style-loader@1.1.0 loader-utils@0.2.17
    Remediation: Upgrade to isomorphic-style-loader@2.0.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in interpolateName function via the URL variable.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade loader-utils to version 1.4.2, 2.0.4, 3.2.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Information Exposure

  • Vulnerable module: sequelize
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@6.28.1.

Overview

sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Information Exposure due to improper user-input, by allowing an attacker to create malicious queries leading to SQL errors.

Remediation

Upgrade sequelize to version 6.28.1 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: validator
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1 validator@5.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@5.22.5.

Overview

validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isSlug function

PoC

var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
    var ret = "111"
    for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
        ret += "a"
    }

    return ret+"_";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
    if (i % 10000 == 0) {
        var time = Date.now();
        var attack_str = build_attack(i)
       validator.isSlug(attack_str)
        var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
        console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
   }
}

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade validator to version 13.6.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: validator
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1 validator@5.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@5.22.5.

Overview

validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isHSL function.

PoC

var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
    var ret = "hsla(0"
    for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
        ret += " "
    }

    return ret+"◎";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
    if (i % 1000 == 0) {
        var time = Date.now();
        var attack_str = build_attack(i)
       validator.isHSL(attack_str)
        var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
        console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
   }
}

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade validator to version 13.6.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: validator
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1 validator@5.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@5.22.5.

Overview

validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isEmail function.

PoC

var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
    var ret = ""
    for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
        ret += "<"
    }

    return ret+"";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
    if (i % 10000 == 0) {
        var time = Date.now();
        var attack_str = build_attack(i)
        validator.isEmail(attack_str,{ allow_display_name: true })
        var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
        console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
   }
}

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade validator to version 13.6.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Session Fixation

  • Vulnerable module: passport
  • Introduced through: passport@0.3.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 passport@0.3.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to passport@0.6.0.

Overview

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade passport to version 0.6.0 or higher.

References

low severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: tar
  • Introduced through: sqlite3@3.1.13

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar@2.2.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to sqlite3@4.0.0.
  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sqlite3@3.1.13 node-pre-gyp@0.6.39 tar-pack@3.4.1 tar@2.2.2

Overview

tar is a full-featured Tar for Node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). When stripping the trailing slash from files arguments, the f.replace(/\/+$/, '') performance of this function can exponentially degrade when f contains many / characters resulting in ReDoS.

This vulnerability is not likely to be exploitable as it requires that the untrusted input is being passed into the tar.extract() or tar.list() array of entries to parse/extract, which would be unusual.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade tar to version 6.1.4, 5.0.8, 4.4.16 or higher.

References

low severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: validator
  • Introduced through: sequelize@3.35.1

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: web@osdlabs/swd#0dc2e45de9def42d54a55135145d7b83a46f8450 sequelize@3.35.1 validator@5.7.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to sequelize@4.17.2.

Overview

validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). It used a regular expression (^\s*data:([a-z]+\/[a-z0-9\-\+]+(;[a-z\-]+=[a-z0-9\-]+)?)?(;base64)?,[a-z0-9!\$&',\(\)\*\+,;=\-\._~:@\/\?%\s]*\s*$) in order to validate Data URIs. 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 16th, 2018 - Initial Response from package owner
  • Feb 18th, 2018 - Fix issued
  • Feb 18th, 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:

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

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

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

String Number of C's Number of steps
ACCCX 3 38
ACCCCX 4 71
ACCCCCX 5 136
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX 14 65,553

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

Remediation

Upgrade validator to version 9.4.1 or higher.

References