Find, fix and prevent vulnerabilities in your code.
critical severity
- Vulnerable module: babel-traverse
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › babel-traverse@6.26.0
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Incomplete List of Disallowed Inputs when using plugins that rely on the path.evaluate()
or path.evaluateTruthy()
internal Babel methods.
Note:
This is only exploitable if the attacker uses known affected plugins such as @babel/plugin-transform-runtime
, @babel/preset-env
when using its useBuiltIns
option, and any "polyfill provider" plugin that depends on @babel/helper-define-polyfill-provider
. No other plugins under the @babel/
namespace are impacted, but third-party plugins might be.
Users that only compile trusted code are not impacted.
Workaround
Users who are unable to upgrade the library can upgrade the affected plugins instead, to avoid triggering the vulnerable code path in affected @babel/traverse
.
Remediation
There is no fixed version for babel-traverse
.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: nodemailer
- Introduced through: nodemailer@4.7.0 and io-functions-commons@0.3.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer@4.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to nodemailer@6.4.16.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › nodemailer@4.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to io-functions-commons@16.0.0.
Overview
nodemailer is an Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Command Injection. Use of crafted recipient email addresses may result in arbitrary command flag injection in sendmail transport for sending mails.
PoC
-bi@example.com (-bi Initialize the alias database.)
-d0.1a@example.com (The option -d0.1 prints the version of sendmail and the options it was compiled with.)
-Dfilename@example.com (Debug output ffile)
Remediation
Upgrade nodemailer
to version 6.4.16 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: ansi-regex
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › babel-traverse@6.26.0 › babel-code-frame@6.26.0 › chalk@1.1.3 › has-ansi@2.0.0 › ansi-regex@2.1.1
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › babel-traverse@6.26.0 › babel-code-frame@6.26.0 › 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:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade ansi-regex
to version 3.0.1, 4.1.1, 5.0.1, 6.0.1 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: html-to-text
- Introduced through: html-to-text@4.0.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › html-to-text@4.0.0Remediation: Upgrade to html-to-text@6.0.0.
Overview
html-to-text is an Advanced html to plain text converter
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The application may crash when the parsed HTML is either very deep or has a big amount of DOM elements.
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 html-to-text
to version 6.0.0 or higher.
References
high severity
new
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution through the zipObjectDeep
function due to improper user input sanitization in the baseZipObject
function.
PoC
lodash.zipobjectdeep:
const zipObjectDeep = require("lodash.zipobjectdeep");
let emptyObject = {};
console.log(`[+] Before prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] Before prototype pollution : undefined
zipObjectDeep(["constructor.prototype.polluted"], [true]);
//we inject our malicious attributes in the vulnerable function
console.log(`[+] After prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] After prototype pollution : true
lodash:
const test = require("lodash");
let emptyObject = {};
console.log(`[+] Before prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] Before prototype pollution : undefined
test.zipObjectDeep(["constructor.prototype.polluted"], [true]);
//we inject our malicious attributes in the vulnerable function
console.log(`[+] After prototype pollution : ${emptyObject.polluted}`);
//[+] After prototype pollution : true
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.17 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: nth-check
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › cheerio@1.0.0-rc.2 › css-select@1.2.0 › nth-check@1.0.2
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › ice-cap@0.0.4 › cheerio@0.20.0 › css-select@1.2.0 › nth-check@1.0.2
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when parsing crafted invalid CSS nth-checks, due to the sub-pattern \s*(?:([+-]?)\s*(\d+))?
in RE_NTH_ELEMENT
with quantified overlapping adjacency.
PoC
var nthCheck = require("nth-check")
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = '2n' + ' '.repeat(i*10000)+"!";
try {
nthCheck.parse(attack_str)
}
catch(err) {
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade nth-check
to version 2.0.1 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: taffydb
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › taffydb@2.7.3
Overview
taffydb is an open source JavaScript library that provides in-memory database capabilities
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Internal Property Tampering. taffy
sets an internal index for each data item in its DB. However, it is found that the internal index can be forged by adding additional properties into user-input. If an index is found in the query, taffyDB
will ignore other query conditions and directly return the indexed data item. Moreover, the internal index is in an easily-guessable format (e.g. T000002R000001
). As such, attackers can use this vulnerability to access any data items in the DB and exploit an SQL Injection.
Note: The taffy package has been deprecated by the author. Its successor package, taffydb, is also found to be vulnerable and is not actively maintained.
PoC
var TAFFY = require('taffy');
var friends = TAFFY([
{"id":1,"gender":"M","username":"Smith","password":"aaa","status":"Active"},
{"id":2,"gender":"F","username":"Ruth","password":"bbb","status":"Active"},
{"id":3,"gender":"M","username":"Stevenson","password":"ccc","status":"Active"},
{"id":4,"gender":"F","username":"Gill","password":"ddd","status":"Active"}
]);
var json = {username:"Smith", "password":"123", "___id":"T000002R000002", "___s":true};
var item1 = friends(json);
console.log(item1.first());
Remediation
There is no fixed version for taffydb
.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: trim
- Introduced through: io-functions-commons@0.3.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › remark-parse@5.0.0 › trim@0.0.1
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › remark-rehype@3.0.2 › mdast-util-to-hast@3.0.4 › trim@0.0.1
Overview
trim is a Trim string whitespace
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the trim()
method.
PoC by Liyuan Chen:
var trim = require("trim")
function build_attack (n) {
var ret = "1"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += " "
}
return ret + "1";
}
var time = Date.now();
trim(build_attack(50000))
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("time_cost: " + time_cost)
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade trim
to version 0.0.3 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The function defaultsDeep
could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype
using a constructor
payload.
PoC by Snyk
const mergeFn = require('lodash').defaultsDeep;
const payload = '{"constructor": {"prototype": {"a0": true}}}'
function check() {
mergeFn({}, JSON.parse(payload));
if (({})[`a0`] === true) {
console.log(`Vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via ${payload}`);
}
}
check();
For more information, check out our blog post
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.12 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the set
and setwith
functions due to improper user input sanitization.
PoC
lod = require('lodash')
lod.set({}, "__proto__[test2]", "456")
console.log(Object.prototype)
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.17 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The functions merge
, mergeWith
, and defaultsDeep
could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype
. This is due to an incomplete fix to CVE-2018-3721
.
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.11 or higher.
References
high severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Command Injection via template
.
PoC
var _ = require('lodash');
_.template('', { variable: '){console.log(process.env)}; with(obj' })()
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.21 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: request
- Introduced through: azure-storage@2.10.7, io-functions-commons@0.3.8 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › azure-storage@2.10.7 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › azure-storage@2.10.7 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › request@2.88.2
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › ice-cap@0.0.4 › cheerio@0.20.0 › jsdom@7.2.2 › request@2.88.2
Overview
request is a simplified http request client.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Server-side Request Forgery (SSRF) due to insufficient checks in the lib/redirect.js
file by allowing insecure redirects in the default configuration, via an attacker-controller server that does a cross-protocol redirect (HTTP to HTTPS, or HTTPS to HTTP).
NOTE: request
package has been deprecated, so a fix is not expected. See https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142.
Remediation
A fix was pushed into the master
branch but not yet published.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
- Introduced through: azure-storage@2.10.7, io-functions-commons@0.3.8 and others
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › azure-storage@2.10.7 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › azure-storage@2.10.7 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › ice-cap@0.0.4 › cheerio@0.20.0 › jsdom@7.2.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › ice-cap@0.0.4 › cheerio@0.20.0 › jsdom@7.2.2 › request@2.88.2 › tough-cookie@2.5.0
Overview
tough-cookie is a RFC6265 Cookies and CookieJar module for Node.js.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to improper handling of Cookies when using CookieJar in rejectPublicSuffixes=false
mode. Due to an issue with the manner in which the objects are initialized, an attacker can expose or modify a limited amount of property information on those objects. There is no impact to availability.
PoC
// PoC.js
async function main(){
var tough = require("tough-cookie");
var cookiejar = new tough.CookieJar(undefined,{rejectPublicSuffixes:false});
// Exploit cookie
await cookiejar.setCookie(
"Slonser=polluted; Domain=__proto__; Path=/notauth",
"https://__proto__/admin"
);
// normal cookie
var cookie = await cookiejar.setCookie(
"Auth=Lol; Domain=google.com; Path=/notauth",
"https://google.com/"
);
//Exploit cookie
var a = {};
console.log(a["/notauth"]["Slonser"])
}
main();
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade tough-cookie
to version 4.1.3 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1Remediation: Open PR to patch lodash@3.10.1.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1Remediation: Open PR to patch lodash@3.10.1.
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The utilities function allow modification of the Object
prototype. If an attacker can control part of the structure passed to this function, they could add or modify an existing property.
PoC by Olivier Arteau (HoLyVieR)
var _= require('lodash');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"oops":"It works !"}}';
var a = {};
console.log("Before : " + a.oops);
_.merge({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log("After : " + a.oops);
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.5 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: nodemailer
- Introduced through: nodemailer@4.7.0 and io-functions-commons@0.3.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer@4.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to nodemailer@6.6.1.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › nodemailer@4.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to io-functions-commons@16.0.0.
Overview
nodemailer is an Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to HTTP Header Injection if unsanitized user input that may contain newlines and carriage returns is passed into an address object.
PoC:
const userEmail = 'foo@bar.comrnSubject: foobar'; // imagine this comes from e.g. HTTP request params or is otherwise user-controllable
await transporter.sendMail({
from: '...',
to: '...',
replyTo: {
name: 'Customer',
address: userEmail,
},
subject: 'My Subject',
text: message,
});
Remediation
Upgrade nodemailer
to version 6.6.1 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › marked@0.3.19
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The em
regex within src/rules.js
file have multiple unused capture groups which could lead to a denial of service attack if user input is reachable.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 1.1.1 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: minimist
- Introduced through: html-to-text@4.0.0 and nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › html-to-text@4.0.0 › optimist@0.6.1 › minimist@0.0.10
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › minimist@1.2.0
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 mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade minimist
to version 0.2.1, 1.2.3 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: underscore
- Introduced through: documentdb@1.15.3 and io-functions-commons@0.3.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › documentdb@1.15.3 › underscore@1.8.3
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › documentdb@1.15.3 › underscore@1.8.3
Overview
underscore is a JavaScript's functional programming helper library.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection via the template
function, particularly when the variable
option is taken from _.templateSettings
as it is not sanitized.
PoC
const _ = require('underscore');
_.templateSettings.variable = "a = this.process.mainModule.require('child_process').execSync('touch HELLO')";
const t = _.template("")();
Remediation
Upgrade underscore
to version 1.13.0-2, 1.12.1 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the toNumber
, trim
and trimEnd
functions.
POC
var lo = require('lodash');
function build_blank (n) {
var ret = "1"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += " "
}
return ret + "1";
}
var s = build_blank(50000)
var time0 = Date.now();
lo.trim(s)
var time_cost0 = Date.now() - time0;
console.log("time_cost0: " + time_cost0)
var time1 = Date.now();
lo.toNumber(s)
var time_cost1 = Date.now() - time1;
console.log("time_cost1: " + time_cost1)
var time2 = Date.now();
lo.trimEnd(s)
var time_cost2 = Date.now() - time2;
console.log("time_cost2: " + time_cost2)
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.21 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › marked@0.3.19
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The inline.text regex
may take quadratic time to scan for potential email addresses starting at every point.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 0.6.2 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › marked@0.3.19
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when passing unsanitized user input to inline.reflinkSearch
, if it is not being parsed by a time-limited worker thread.
PoC
import * as marked from 'marked';
console.log(marked.parse(`[x]: x
\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](\\[\\](`));
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 4.0.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › marked@0.3.19
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when unsanitized user input is passed to block.def
.
PoC
import * as marked from "marked";
marked.parse(`[x]:${' '.repeat(1500)}x ${' '.repeat(1500)} x`);
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 4.0.10 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: marked
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › marked@0.3.19
Overview
marked is a low-level compiler for parsing markdown without caching or blocking for long periods of time.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). A Denial of Service condition could be triggered through exploitation of the heading
regex.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade marked
to version 0.4.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: nodemailer
- Introduced through: nodemailer@4.7.0 and io-functions-commons@0.3.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer@4.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to nodemailer@6.9.9.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › nodemailer@4.7.0Remediation: Upgrade to io-functions-commons@16.0.0.
Overview
nodemailer is an Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the attachDataUrls
parameter or when parsing attachments with an embedded file. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted email that triggers inefficient regular expression evaluation, leading to excessive consumption of CPU resources.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade nodemailer
to version 6.9.9 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: validator
- Introduced through: validator@10.11.0 and italia-ts-commons@5.1.13
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › validator@10.11.0Remediation: Upgrade to validator@13.6.0.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › italia-ts-commons@5.1.13 › validator@10.11.0
Overview
validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isSlug
function
PoC
var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "111"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "a"
}
return ret+"_";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
if (i % 10000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i)
validator.isSlug(attack_str)
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade validator
to version 13.6.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: validator
- Introduced through: validator@10.11.0 and italia-ts-commons@5.1.13
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › validator@10.11.0Remediation: Upgrade to validator@13.6.0.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › italia-ts-commons@5.1.13 › validator@10.11.0
Overview
validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isHSL
function.
PoC
var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "hsla(0"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += " "
}
return ret+"◎";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
if (i % 1000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i)
validator.isHSL(attack_str)
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade validator
to version 13.6.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: validator
- Introduced through: validator@10.11.0 and italia-ts-commons@5.1.13
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › validator@10.11.0Remediation: Upgrade to validator@13.6.0.
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › italia-ts-commons@5.1.13 › validator@10.11.0
Overview
validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the isEmail
function.
PoC
var validator = require("validator")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = ""
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "<"
}
return ret+"";
}
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
if (i % 10000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i)
validator.isEmail(attack_str,{ allow_display_name: true })
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
}
}
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade validator
to version 13.6.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: xml2js
- Introduced through: azure-storage@2.10.7 and io-functions-commons@0.3.8
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › azure-storage@2.10.7 › xml2js@0.2.8
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › io-functions-commons@0.3.8 › azure-storage@2.10.7 › xml2js@0.2.8
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to allowing an external attacker to edit or add new properties to an object. This is possible because the application does not properly validate incoming JSON keys, thus allowing the __proto__
property to be edited.
PoC
var parseString = require('xml2js').parseString;
let normal_user_request = "<role>admin</role>";
let malicious_user_request = "<__proto__><role>admin</role></__proto__>";
const update_user = (userProp) => {
// A user cannot alter his role. This way we prevent privilege escalations.
parseString(userProp, function (err, user) {
if(user.hasOwnProperty("role") && user?.role.toLowerCase() === "admin") {
console.log("Unauthorized Action");
} else {
console.log(user?.role[0]);
}
});
}
update_user(normal_user_request);
update_user(malicious_user_request);
Details
Prototype Pollution is a vulnerability affecting JavaScript. Prototype Pollution refers to the ability to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes, such as objects. JavaScript allows all Object attributes to be altered, including their magical attributes such as __proto__
, constructor
and prototype
. An attacker manipulates these attributes to overwrite, or pollute, a JavaScript application object prototype of the base object by injecting other values. Properties on the Object.prototype
are then inherited by all the JavaScript objects through the prototype chain. When that happens, this leads to either denial of service by triggering JavaScript exceptions, or it tampers with the application source code to force the code path that the attacker injects, thereby leading to remote code execution.
There are two main ways in which the pollution of prototypes occurs:
Unsafe
Object
recursive mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade xml2js
to version 0.5.0 or higher.
References
medium severity
- Vulnerable module: lodash
- Introduced through: nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › lodash@3.10.1
Overview
lodash is a modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance, & extras.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). It parses dates using regex strings, which may cause a slowdown of 2 seconds per 50k characters.
Details
Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its original and legitimate users. There are many types of DoS attacks, ranging from trying to clog the network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines (a Distributed Denial of Service - DDoS - attack) to sending crafted requests that cause a system to crash or take a disproportional amount of time to process.
The Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a type of Denial of Service attack. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but they aren't very intuitive and can ultimately end up making it easy for attackers to take your site down.
Let’s take the following regular expression as an example:
regex = /A(B|C+)+D/
This regular expression accomplishes the following:
A
The string must start with the letter 'A'(B|C+)+
The string must then follow the letter A with either the letter 'B' or some number of occurrences of the letter 'C' (the+
matches one or more times). The+
at the end of this section states that we can look for one or more matches of this section.D
Finally, we ensure this section of the string ends with a 'D'
The expression would match inputs such as ABBD
, ABCCCCD
, ABCBCCCD
and ACCCCCD
It most cases, it doesn't take very long for a regex engine to find a match:
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCD")'
0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.052 total
$ time node -e '/A(B|C+)+D/.test("ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCX")'
1.79s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.812 total
The entire process of testing it against a 30 characters long string takes around ~52ms. But when given an invalid string, it takes nearly two seconds to complete the test, over ten times as long as it took to test a valid string. The dramatic difference is due to the way regular expressions get evaluated.
Most Regex engines will work very similarly (with minor differences). The engine will match the first possible way to accept the current character and proceed to the next one. If it then fails to match the next one, it will backtrack and see if there was another way to digest the previous character. If it goes too far down the rabbit hole only to find out the string doesn’t match in the end, and if many characters have multiple valid regex paths, the number of backtracking steps can become very large, resulting in what is known as catastrophic backtracking.
Let's look at how our expression runs into this problem, using a shorter string: "ACCCX". While it seems fairly straightforward, there are still four different ways that the engine could match those three C's:
- CCC
- CC+C
- C+CC
- C+C+C.
The engine has to try each of those combinations to see if any of them potentially match against the expression. When you combine that with the other steps the engine must take, we can use RegEx 101 debugger to see the engine has to take a total of 38 steps before it can determine the string doesn't match.
From there, the number of steps the engine must use to validate a string just continues to grow.
String | Number of C's | Number of steps |
---|---|---|
ACCCX | 3 | 38 |
ACCCCX | 4 | 71 |
ACCCCCX | 5 | 136 |
ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCX | 14 | 65,553 |
By the time the string includes 14 C's, the engine has to take over 65,000 steps just to see if the string is valid. These extreme situations can cause them to work very slowly (exponentially related to input size, as shown above), allowing an attacker to exploit this and can cause the service to excessively consume CPU, resulting in a Denial of Service.
Remediation
Upgrade lodash
to version 4.17.11 or higher.
References
low severity
- Vulnerable module: minimist
- Introduced through: html-to-text@4.0.0 and nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0
Detailed paths
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › html-to-text@4.0.0 › optimist@0.6.1 › minimist@0.0.10
-
Introduced through: digital-citizenship-functions@teamdigitale/digital-citizenship-functions#081e9caba58551eff930b19d3833f622b5708af3 › nodemailer-sendgrid-transport@0.2.0 › sendgrid@1.9.2 › smtpapi@1.4.7 › esdoc@1.1.0 › minimist@1.2.0
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 mergeProperty definition by path
Unsafe Object recursive merge
The logic of a vulnerable recursive merge function follows the following high-level model:
merge (target, source)
foreach property of source
if property exists and is an object on both the target and the source
merge(target[property], source[property])
else
target[property] = source[property]
When the source object contains a property named __proto__
defined with Object.defineProperty()
, the condition that checks if the property exists and is an object on both the target and the source passes and the merge recurses with the target, being the prototype of Object
and the source of Object
as defined by the attacker. Properties are then copied on the Object
prototype.
Clone operations are a special sub-class of unsafe recursive merges, which occur when a recursive merge is conducted on an empty object: merge({},source)
.
lodash
and Hoek
are examples of libraries susceptible to recursive merge attacks.
Property definition by path
There are a few JavaScript libraries that use an API to define property values on an object based on a given path. The function that is generally affected contains this signature: theFunction(object, path, value)
If the attacker can control the value of “path”, they can set this value to __proto__.myValue
. myValue
is then assigned to the prototype of the class of the object.
Types of attacks
There are a few methods by which Prototype Pollution can be manipulated:
Type | Origin | Short description |
---|---|---|
Denial of service (DoS) | Client | This is the most likely attack. DoS occurs when Object holds generic functions that are implicitly called for various operations (for example, toString and valueOf ). The attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr and alters its state to an unexpected value such as Int or Object . In this case, the code fails and is likely to cause a denial of service. For example: if an attacker pollutes Object.prototype.toString by defining it as an integer, if the codebase at any point was reliant on someobject.toString() it would fail. |
Remote Code Execution | Client | Remote code execution is generally only possible in cases where the codebase evaluates a specific attribute of an object, and then executes that evaluation. For example: eval(someobject.someattr) . In this case, if the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.someattr they are likely to be able to leverage this in order to execute code. |
Property Injection | Client | The attacker pollutes properties that the codebase relies on for their informative value, including security properties such as cookies or tokens. For example: if a codebase checks privileges for someuser.isAdmin , then when the attacker pollutes Object.prototype.isAdmin and sets it to equal true , they can then achieve admin privileges. |
Affected environments
The following environments are susceptible to a Prototype Pollution attack:
Application server
Web server
Web browser
How to prevent
Freeze the prototype— use
Object.freeze (Object.prototype)
.Require schema validation of JSON input.
Avoid using unsafe recursive merge functions.
Consider using objects without prototypes (for example,
Object.create(null)
), breaking the prototype chain and preventing pollution.As a best practice use
Map
instead ofObject
.
For more information on this vulnerability type:
Arteau, Oliver. “JavaScript prototype pollution attack in NodeJS application.” GitHub, 26 May 2018
Remediation
Upgrade minimist
to version 0.2.4, 1.2.6 or higher.