Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting colors package, versions >1.4.0


0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 0.39% (74th percentile)
Expand this section
NVD
7.5 high

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications
  • Snyk ID SNYK-JS-COLORS-2331906
  • published 9 Jan 2022
  • disclosed 9 Jan 2022
  • credit Unknown

How to fix?

There is no fixed version for colors.

Overview

colors is a color manipulation library.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) that was introduced through an infinite loop in the americanFlag module.

Unfortunately this appears to have been a purposeful attempt by a maintainer of colors to make the package unusable, other maintainers' controls over this package appear to have been revoked in an attempt to prevent them from fixing the issue.

Vulnerable Code

for (let i = 666; i < Infinity; i++;) {

Alternative Remediation Suggested

  • Pin dependency to 1.4.0

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