cordova vulnerabilities

• Vulnerable module: cryptiles
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@8.0.1-nightly.2018.5.2.fc69a0bd

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@8.0.1-nightly.2018.5.2.aeb1ddbc > cordova-lib@8.0.1-nightly.2018.5.2.fc69a0bd > request@2.79.0 > hawk@3.1.3 > cryptiles@2.0.5

Overview

cryptiles is a package for general crypto utilities.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Insecure Randomness. The randomDigits() method is supposed to return a cryptographically strong pseudo-random data string, but it was biased to certain digits. An attacker could be able to guess the created digits.

Remediation

Upgrade to version 4.1.2 and higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: tunnel-agent
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@8.0.1-nightly.2018.5.2.fc69a0bd

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@8.0.1-nightly.2018.5.2.aeb1ddbc > cordova-lib@8.0.1-nightly.2018.5.2.fc69a0bd > request@2.79.0 > tunnel-agent@0.4.3

Overview

tunnel-agent is HTTP proxy tunneling agent. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure.

A possible memory disclosure vulnerability exists when a value of type number is used to set the proxy.auth option of a request request and results in a possible uninitialized memory exposures in the request body.

This is a result of unobstructed use of the Buffer constructor, whose insecure default constructor increases the odds of memory leakage.

Details

Constructing a Buffer class with integer N creates a Buffer of length N with raw (not "zero-ed") memory.

In the following example, the first call would allocate 100 bytes of memory, while the second example will allocate the memory needed for the string "100":

// uninitialized Buffer of length 100
x = new Buffer(100);
// initialized Buffer with value of '100'
x = new Buffer('100');

tunnel-agent's request construction uses the default Buffer constructor as-is, making it easy to append uninitialized memory to an existing list. If the value of the buffer list is exposed to users, it may expose raw server side memory, potentially holding secrets, private data and code. This is a similar vulnerability to the infamous Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL.

Proof of concept by ChALkeR

require('request')({
  method: 'GET',
  uri: 'http://www.example.com',
  tunnel: true,
  proxy:{
      protocol: 'http:',
      host:"127.0.0.1",
      port:8080,
      auth:80
  }
});

You can read more about the insecure Buffer behavior on our blog.

Similar vulnerabilities were discovered in request, mongoose, ws and sequelize.

Remediation

Upgrade tunnel-agent to version 0.6.0 or higher. Note This is vulnerable only for Node <=4

References

• PoC by ChALkeR
• Github Commit

• Vulnerable module: npm
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@7.1.1-nightly.2017.12.12.3109e4fe

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@7.1.1-nightly.2017.12.12.8262ae29 > cordova-lib@7.1.1-nightly.2017.12.12.3109e4fe > npm@2.15.12

Overview

npm is a JavaScript package manager.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Access Restriction Bypass. It might allow local users to bypass intended filesystem access restrictions due to ownerships of /etc and /usr directories are being changed unexpectedly, related to a "correctMkdir" issue.

Remediation

Upgrade npm to version 5.7.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Issue

• Vulnerable module: request
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@6.5.1-nightly.2017.3.24.00341c04

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@6.5.1-nightly.2017.3.24.035d86c6 > cordova-lib@6.5.1-nightly.2017.3.24.00341c04 > request@2.47.0

Overview

request is a simplified http request client. A potential remote memory exposure vulnerability exists in request. If a request uses a multipart attachment and the body type option is number with value X, then X bytes of uninitialized memory will be sent in the body of the request.

Note that while the impact of this vulnerability is high (memory exposure), exploiting it is likely difficult, as the attacker needs to somehow control the body type of the request. One potential exploit scenario is when a request is composed based on JSON input, including the body type, allowing a malicious JSON to trigger the memory leak.

Details

Constructing a Buffer class with integer N creates a Buffer of length N with non zero-ed out memory. Example:

var x = new Buffer(100); // uninitialized Buffer of length 100
// vs
var x = new Buffer('100'); // initialized Buffer with value of '100'

Initializing a multipart body in such manner will cause uninitialized memory to be sent in the body of the request.

Proof of concept

var http = require('http')
var request = require('request')

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  var data = ''
  req.setEncoding('utf8')
  req.on('data', function (chunk) {
    console.log('data')
    data += chunk
  })
  req.on('end', function () {
    // this will print uninitialized memory from the client
    console.log('Client sent:\n', data)
  })
  res.end()
}).listen(8000)

request({
  method: 'POST',
  uri: 'http://localhost:8000',
  multipart: [{ body: 1000 }]
},
function (err, res, body) {
  if (err) return console.error('upload failed:', err)
  console.log('sent')
})

Remediation

Upgrade request to version 2.68.0 or higher.

If a direct dependency update is not possible, use snyk wizard to patch this vulnerability.

References

• GitHub PR
• Blog: Node Buffer API fix
• Blog: Information about Buffer

• Vulnerable module: http-signature
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@6.5.1-nightly.2017.3.24.00341c04

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@6.5.1-nightly.2017.3.24.035d86c6 > cordova-lib@6.5.1-nightly.2017.3.24.00341c04 > request@2.47.0 > http-signature@0.10.1

Overview

http-signature is a reference implementation of Joyent's HTTP Signature scheme.

Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Timing Attacks due to time-variable comparison of signatures.

The library implemented a character to character comparison, similar to the built-in string comparison mechanism, ===, and not a time constant string comparison. As a result, the comparison will fail faster when the first characters in the signature are incorrect. An attacker can use this difference to perform a timing attack, essentially allowing them to guess the signature one character at a time.

You can read more about timing attacks in Node.js on the Snyk blog.

Remediation

Upgrade http-signature to version 1.0.0 or higher.

References

• Github PR
• Github Commit

• Vulnerable module: node-uuid
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@6.1.1

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@6.1.1 > cordova-lib@6.1.1 > xcode@0.8.0 > node-uuid@1.3.3

Overview

node-uuid is a Simple, fast generation of RFC4122 UUIDS.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Insecure Randomness. It uses the cryptographically insecure Math.random which can produce predictable values and should not be used in security-sensitive context.

Remediation

Upgrade node-uuid to version 1.4.4 or greater.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Issue 2

• Vulnerable module: npm
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@5.1.1

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4

Overview

This vulnerability could cause the unintentional leakage of bearer tokens. A design flaw in npm's registry allows an attacker to set up an HTTP server that could collect authentication information, and then use this authentication information to impersonate the users whose tokens they collected. The attacker could do anything the compromised users could do, including publishing new versions of packages.

Details

The primary npm registry has, since late 2014, used HTTP bearer tokens to authenticate requests from the npm command-line interface. Due to a design flaw in the CLI, these bearer tokens were sent with every request made by logged-in users, regardless of the destination of the request. (The bearers only should have been included for requests made against a registry or registries used for the current install.)

This flaw allows an attacker to set up an HTTP server that could collect authentication information. They could then use this information to impersonate the users whose tokens they collected. This impersonation would allow them to do anything the compromised users could do, including publishing new versions of packages.

With the fixes npm have released, the CLI will only send bearer tokens with requests made against a registry. npm’s CLI team believe that the fix won’t break any existing registry setups. However, it’s possible the change will be breaking in some cases, due to the large number of registry software suites used.

Remediation

1. Upgrade npm to ">= 3.8.3 || >= 2.15.1"
2. Invalidate your current npm bearer tokens

References

• NodeJS Blog
• npm Blog
• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: semver
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@5.1.1, cordova-lib@5.1.1 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > semver@2.0.11
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npmconf@0.1.16 > semver@2.3.2
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > read-installed@0.2.5 > semver@2.3.2
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > read-package-json@1.1.9 > normalize-package-data@0.2.13 > semver@2.3.2
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > npmconf@0.1.16 > semver@2.3.2
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > semver@2.1.0
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > node-gyp@0.10.10 > semver@2.1.0
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > npm-registry-client@0.2.31 > semver@2.3.2
• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > init-package-json@0.0.10 > semver@2.3.2

Overview

npm is a package manager for javascript.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The semver module uses regular expressions when parsing a version string. For a carefully crafted input, the time it takes to process these regular expressions is not linear to the length of the input. Since the semver module did not enforce a limit on the version string length, an attacker could provide a long string that would take up a large amount of resources, potentially taking a server down. This issue therefore enables a potential Denial of Service attack. This is a slightly differnt variant of a typical Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Update to a version 4.3.2 or greater. From the issue description [2]: "Package version can no longer be more than 256 characters long. This prevents a situation in which parsing the version number can use exponentially more time and memory to parse, leading to a potential denial of service."

References

• GitHub Release

• Vulnerable module: qs
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@5.1.1

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > request@2.21.0 > qs@0.6.6

Overview

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

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). When parsing a string representing a deeply nested object, qs will block the event loop for long periods of time. Such a delay may hold up the server's resources, keeping it from processing other requests in the meantime, thus enabling a Denial-of-Service attack.

Remediation

Update qs to version 1.0.0 or higher. In these versions, qs enforces a max object depth (along with other limits), limiting the event loop length and thus preventing such an attack.

References

• Node Security Advisory

• Vulnerable module: http-signature
• Introduced through: cordova-lib@5.1.1

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@5.1.1 > cordova-lib@5.1.1 > npm@1.3.4 > request@2.21.0 > http-signature@0.9.11

Overview

http-signature is a Reference implementation of Joyent's HTTP Signature scheme. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to header forgery, due to the header names not being signed. An attacker could switch the header list order and header value order ending up wit the same signature for two separate requests.

Remediation

Upgrade http-signature to version 0.10.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: uglify-js
• Introduced through: umd@2.1.0, umd@2.1.0 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: browserify@5.0.0 > umd@2.1.0 > uglify-js@2.4.24
• Introduced through: browserify@5.0.0 > umd@2.1.0 > ruglify@1.0.0 > uglify-js@2.2.5
• Introduced through: cordova@5.0.0 > cordova-lib@5.0.0 > cordova-js@3.9.0 > browserify@7.1.0 > browser-pack@3.2.0 > umd@2.1.0 > uglify-js@2.4.24
• Introduced through: cordova@5.0.0 > cordova-lib@5.0.0 > cordova-js@3.9.0 > browserify@7.1.0 > umd@2.1.0 > uglify-js@2.4.24
• Introduced through: cordova@5.0.0 > cordova-lib@5.0.0 > cordova-js@3.9.0 > browserify@7.1.0 > browser-pack@3.2.0 > umd@2.1.0 > ruglify@1.0.0 > uglify-js@2.2.5
• Introduced through: cordova@5.0.0 > cordova-lib@5.0.0 > cordova-js@3.9.0 > browserify@7.1.0 > umd@2.1.0 > ruglify@1.0.0 > uglify-js@2.2.5

Overview

The parse() function in the uglify-js package prior to version 2.6.0 is vulnerable to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) attacks when long inputs of certain patterns are processed.

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade to version 2.6.0 or greater. If a direct dependency update is not possible, use snyk wizard to patch this vulnerability.

References

• OWASP - ReDoS

• Vulnerable module: express
• Introduced through: express@3.0.0 and ripple-emulator@0.9.18

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > express@3.0.0
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0

Overview

express is a minimalist web framework.

Affected versions of this package do not enforce the user's browser to set a specific charset in the content-type header while displaying 400 level response messages. This could be used by remote attackers to perform a cross-site scripting attack, by using non-standard encodings like UTF-7.

Details

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks occur when an attacker tricks a user’s browser to execute malicious JavaScript code in the context of a victim’s domain. Such scripts can steal the user’s session cookies for the domain, scrape or modify its content, and perform or modify actions on the user’s behalf, actions typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

These attacks are possible by escaping the context of the web application and injecting malicious scripts in an otherwise trusted website. These scripts can introduce additional attributes (say, a "new" option in a dropdown list or a new link to a malicious site) and can potentially execute code on the clients side, unbeknown to the victim. This occurs when characters like \< > \" \' are not escaped properly.

There are a few types of XSS:

• Persistent XSS is an attack in which the malicious code persists into the web app’s database.
• Reflected XSS is an which the website echoes back a portion of the request. The attacker needs to trick the user into clicking a malicious link (for instance through a phishing email or malicious JS on another page), which triggers the XSS attack.
• DOM-based XSS is an that occurs purely in the browser when client-side JavaScript echoes back a portion of the URL onto the page. DOM-Based XSS is notoriously hard to detect, as the server never gets a chance to see the attack taking place.

Recommendations

Update express to 3.11.0, 4.5.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub release 3.11.0
• GitHub release 4.5.0

• Vulnerable module: cookie-signature
• Introduced through: ripple-emulator@0.9.18 and ripple-emulator@0.9.18

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > cookie-signature@0.0.1
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > connect@2.7.2 > cookie-signature@0.0.1

Overview

'cookie-signature' is a library for signing cookies.

Versions before 1.0.4 of the library use the built-in string comparison mechanism, ===, and not a time constant string comparison. As a result, the comparison will fail faster when the first characters in the token are incorrect. An attacker can use this difference to perform a timing attack, essentially allowing them to guess the secret one character at a time.

You can read more about timing attacks in Node.js on the Snyk blog: https://snyk.io/blog/node-js-timing-attack-ccc-ctf/

Remediation

Upgrade to 1.0.4 or greater.

References

• GitHub History
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: connect
• Introduced through: express@3.0.0 and ripple-emulator@0.9.18

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > express@3.0.0 > connect@2.6.0
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > connect@2.7.2

Overview

Connect is a stack of middleware that is executed in order in each request.

The "methodOverride" middleware allows the http post to override the method of the request with the value of the _method post key or with the header "x-http-method-override".

Because the user post input was not checked, req.method could contain any kind of value. Because the req.method did not match any common method VERB, connect answered with a 404 page containing the "Cannot [method] [url]" content. The method was not properly encoded for output in the browser.

Source: Node Security Project

Example

~ curl "localhost:3000" -d "_method=<script src=http://nodesecurity.io/xss.js></script>"
Cannot <SCRIPT SRC=HTTP://NODESECURITY.IO/XSS.JS></SCRIPT> /

Mitigation factors

Update to the newest version of Connect or disable methodOverride. It is not possible to avoid the vulnerability if you have enabled this middleware in the top of your stack.

History

• (2013-06-27) Bug reported
• (2013-06-27) First fix: escape req.method output
• (2013-06-27) Second fix: whitelist

Details

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks occur when an attacker tricks a user’s browser to execute malicious JavaScript code in the context of a victim’s domain. Such scripts can steal the user’s session cookies for the domain, scrape or modify its content, and perform or modify actions on the user’s behalf, actions typically blocked by the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

These attacks are possible by escaping the context of the web application and injecting malicious scripts in an otherwise trusted website. These scripts can introduce additional attributes (say, a "new" option in a dropdown list or a new link to a malicious site) and can potentially execute code on the clients side, unbeknown to the victim. This occurs when characters like \< > \" \' are not escaped properly.

There are a few types of XSS:

• Persistent XSS is an attack in which the malicious code persists into the web app’s database.
• Reflected XSS is an which the website echoes back a portion of the request. The attacker needs to trick the user into clicking a malicious link (for instance through a phishing email or malicious JS on another page), which triggers the XSS attack.
• DOM-based XSS is an that occurs purely in the browser when client-side JavaScript echoes back a portion of the URL onto the page. DOM-Based XSS is notoriously hard to detect, as the server never gets a chance to see the attack taking place.

• Vulnerable module: tough-cookie
• Introduced through: npm@1.3.26

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > npm@1.3.26 > request@2.30.0 > tough-cookie@0.9.15

Overview

tough-cookie is RFC6265 Cookies and Cookie Jar for node.js.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks. An attacker may pass a specially crafted cookie, causing the server to hang.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade to version 2.3.3 or newer.

References

• Github Issue

• Vulnerable module: send
• Introduced through: express@3.0.0, express@3.0.0 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > express@3.0.0 > connect@2.6.0 > send@0.0.4
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > express@3.0.0 > send@0.1.0
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > send@0.1.0
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > connect@2.7.2 > send@0.1.0

Overview

send is a library for streaming files from the file system.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Directory-Traversal attacks due to insecure comparison. When relying on the root option to restrict file access a malicious user may escape out of the restricted directory and access files in a similarly named directory. For example, a path like /my-secret is consedered fine for the root /my.

Details

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

Directory Traversal vulnerabilities can be generally divided into two types:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remediation

Upgrade to a version greater than or equal to 0.8.4.

References

• GitHub PR
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: send
• Introduced through: express@3.0.0, express@3.0.0 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > express@3.0.0 > connect@2.6.0 > send@0.0.4
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > express@3.0.0 > send@0.1.0
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > send@0.1.0
• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > express@3.1.0 > connect@2.7.2 > send@0.1.0

Overview

Send is a library for streaming files from the file system as an http response. It supports partial responses (Ranges), conditional-GET negotiation, high test coverage, and granular events which may be leveraged to take appropriate actions in your application or framework.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to a Root Path Disclosure.

Remediation

Upgrade send to version 0.11.1 or higher. If a direct dependency update is not possible, use snyk wizard to patch this vulnerability.

References

• GitHub PR
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub History
• Expressjs Security Update

• Vulnerable module: moment
• Introduced through: ripple-emulator@0.9.18

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: cordova@3.3.1-0.1.2 > ripple-emulator@0.9.18 > moment@1.7.2

Overview

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

Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks for any locale that has separate format and standalone options and format input can be controlled by the user.

An attacker can provide a specially crafted input to the format function, which nearly matches the pattern being matched. This will cause the regular expression matching to take a long time, all the while occupying the event loop and preventing it from processing other requests and making the server unavailable (a Denial of Service attack).

Disclosure Timeline

• October 19th, 2016 - Reported the issue to package owner.
• October 19th, 2016 - Issue acknowledged by package owner.
• October 24th, 2016 - Issue fixed and version 2.15.2 released.

Details

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

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

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

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

This regular expression accomplishes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

• Proof of concept
• Fix commit