hapi vulnerabilities

• Vulnerable module: cryptiles
• Introduced through: cryptiles@3.1.2, iron@4.0.5 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@16.6.3 > cryptiles@3.1.2
• Introduced through: hapi@16.6.3 > iron@4.0.5 > cryptiles@3.1.2
• Introduced through: hapi@16.6.3 > statehood@5.0.3 > cryptiles@3.1.2
• Introduced through: hapi@16.6.3 > statehood@5.0.3 > iron@4.0.5 > cryptiles@3.1.2

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: hapi
• Introduced through: hapi@16.1.0

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@16.1.0

Overview

hapi is an HTTP Server framework. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). A client can send a malformed accept-encoding header to the server, invoking an uncaught exception and may cause the server to crash or hang for long periods of time.

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 hapi to version 16.1.1 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: call
• Introduced through: call@2.0.2

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@11.0.3 > call@2.0.2

Overview

call is the primary HTTP router of the hapi framework.

The vulnerability arise from undefined values inside a path (last segment being an exception) making their way into components that do not care for values being undefined (eg. the database layer).

For example, the request URI /delete/company// may incorrectly match a route looking for /delete/company/{company}/. By itself, the bad match is not a vulnerability. However, depending on the remaining logic in the application, such a bad match may result in skipping a protection mechanisms. In the above example, if the route translates to a DB delete command, it might delete all the companies from the db.

Remediation

Upgrade to version 3.0.2 or higher.

References

https://github.com/hapijs/hapi/issues/3228 https://github.com/hapijs/call/commit/9570eee5358b4383715cc6a13cb95971678efd30

• Vulnerable module: content
• Introduced through: subtext@2.0.2 and subtext@2.0.2

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@11.0.3 > subtext@2.0.2 > content@1.0.2
• Introduced through: hapi@11.0.3 > subtext@2.0.2 > pez@1.0.0 > content@1.0.2

Overview

content is HTTP Content-* headers parsing.

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

Details

<< ReDoS>>

Remediation

Upgrade content to version 3.0.6 or higher.

References

• Github Issue
• Github Commit

• Vulnerable module: semver
• Introduced through: semver@2.3.2

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@6.11.1 > 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: qs@0.6.6

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@6.3.0 > 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: hapi
• Introduced through: hapi@6.0.2

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@6.0.2

Overview

This description taken from the pull request provided by Patrick Kettner.

tl:dr - someone created a alphanum only swf converter, which means that they can in theory use it as a callback at a JSONP endpoint, and as a result, send data across domains.

Prepending callbacks with an empty inline comment breaks the flash parser, and prevents the issue. This is a fairly common solution currently being implemented by Google, Facebook, and GitHub.

Source: Node Security Project

Details

Background from the vulnerabilty finder

Remediation

Upgrade to the latest version of hapi.js

References

• PR #1766 - prepend jsonp callbacks with a comment to prevent the rosetta-flash vulnerability

• Vulnerable module: request
• Introduced through: bower-registry-client@0.1.6, request@2.25.0 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: bower@1.1.0 > bower-registry-client@0.1.6 > request@2.27.0
• Introduced through: bower@1.1.0 > request@2.25.0
• Introduced through: yo@1.1.0 > insight@0.3.1 > request@2.27.0
• Introduced through: yo@1.1.0 > yeoman-generator@0.15.0 > request@2.30.0
• Introduced through: hapi@1.1.0 > request@2.21.0

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: bower-registry-client@0.1.6, request@2.25.0 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: bower@1.1.0 > bower-registry-client@0.1.6 > request@2.27.0 > http-signature@0.10.1
• Introduced through: bower@1.1.0 > request@2.25.0 > http-signature@0.10.1
• Introduced through: yo@1.1.0 > insight@0.3.1 > request@2.27.0 > http-signature@0.10.1
• Introduced through: yo@1.1.0 > yeoman-generator@0.15.0 > request@2.30.0 > http-signature@0.10.1
• Introduced through: hapi@1.1.0 > 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 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: tunnel-agent
• Introduced through: bower-registry-client@0.1.6, request@2.25.0 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: bower@1.1.0 > bower-registry-client@0.1.6 > request@2.27.0 > tunnel-agent@0.3.0
• Introduced through: bower@1.1.0 > request@2.25.0 > tunnel-agent@0.3.0
• Introduced through: yo@1.1.0 > insight@0.3.1 > request@2.27.0 > tunnel-agent@0.3.0
• Introduced through: yo@1.1.0 > yeoman-generator@0.15.0 > request@2.30.0 > tunnel-agent@0.3.0
• Introduced through: hapi@1.1.0 > request@2.21.0 > tunnel-agent@0.3.0

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: http-signature
• Introduced through: request@2.21.0

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@1.1.0 > 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: hoek
• Introduced through: oz@0.1.2

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.16.0 > oz@0.1.2 > hoek@0.6.2

Overview

hoek is an npm package used as a central place to store hapi-specific utility methods. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS). The fix was introduced in version 0.7.3 by adding comprehensive html and javascript escaping.

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.

Remediation

Upgrade hoek to version 0.7.3 or higher.

References

• https://github.com/hapijs/hoek
• https://github.com/hapijs/hoek/pull/23

• Vulnerable module: hapi
• Introduced through: hapi@0.15.9

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.15.9

Overview

hapi is an HTTP Server framework. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS). They do not handle invalid payloads, allowing attackers craft malicious links or create a third party web page to inject code into the browser. The fix was introduced in version 0.16.0 by parsing the payload and verifying its validity.

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.

Remediation

Upgrade hapi to version 0.16.0 or higher, although later versions are also susceptible to vulnerabilities. Last known safe version is 11.1.4.

References

• https://github.com/hapijs/hapi/pull/700
• https://github.com/hapijs/hapi/commit/41eadf911fb4d9ca765891474e7d0edefd883402

• Vulnerable module: uglify-js
• Introduced through: lout@0.0.3

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > lout@0.0.3 > handlebars@1.0.12 > uglify-js@2.3.6

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: handlebars
• Introduced through: lout@0.0.3

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > lout@0.0.3 > handlebars@1.0.12

Overview

handlebars provides the power necessary to let you build semantic templates.

When using attributes without quotes in a handlebars template, an attacker can manipulate the input to introduce additional attributes, potentially executing code. This may lead to a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability, assuming an attacker can influence the value entered into the template. If the handlebars template is used to render user-generated content, this vulnerability may escalate to a persistent XSS vulnerability.

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.

Example:

Assume handlebars was used to display user comments and avatar, using the following template: <img src={{avatarUrl}}><pre>{{comment}}</pre>

If an attacker spoofed their avatar URL and provided the following value: http://evil.org/avatar.png onload=alert(document.cookie)

The resulting HTML would be the following, triggering the script once the image loads: <img src=http://evil.org/avatar.png onload=alert(document.cookie)><pre>Gotcha!</pre>

References

• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: boom
• Introduced through: boom@0.2.1, hawk@0.6.1 and others

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > hawk@0.6.1 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > oz@0.0.19 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > hawk@0.6.1 > cryptiles@0.0.2 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > oz@0.0.19 > cryptiles@0.0.2 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > oz@0.0.19 > iron@0.1.1 > cryptiles@0.0.2 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > iron@0.1.1 > cryptiles@0.0.2 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > cryptiles@0.0.2 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > oz@0.0.19 > iron@0.1.1 > boom@0.2.1
• Introduced through: hapi@0.13.3 > iron@0.1.1 > boom@0.2.1

Overview

boom is an npm package that provides a set of utilities for returning HTTP errors. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS).

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.

Remediation

Upgrade boom to version 0.3.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Commit
• GitHub PR

• Vulnerable module: ws
• Introduced through: socket.io@0.9.19 and ws@0.4.32

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: karma@0.8.4 > socket.io@0.9.19 > socket.io-client@0.9.16 > ws@0.4.32
• Introduced through: hapi@0.8.4 > ws@0.4.32

Overview

ws is a simple to use websocket client, server and console for node.js. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure.

A client side memory disclosure vulnerability exists in ping functionality of the ws service. When a client sends a ping request and provides an integer value as ping data, it will result in leaking an uninitialized memory buffer.

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

ws's ping function 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 memory, potentially holding secrets, private data and code.

Proof of Concept:

var ws = require('ws')

var server = new ws.Server({ port: 9000 })
var client = new ws('ws://localhost:9000')

client.on('open', function () {
  console.log('open')
  client.ping(50) // this makes the client allocate an uninitialized buffer of 50 bytes and send it to the server

  client.on('pong', function (data) {
    console.log('got pong')
    console.log(data)
  })
})

Details

The Buffer class on Node.js is a mutable array of binary data, and can be initialized with a string, array or number.

const buf1 = new Buffer([1,2,3]);
// creates a buffer containing [01, 02, 03]
const buf2 = new Buffer('test');
// creates a buffer containing ASCII bytes [74, 65, 73, 74]
const buf3 = new Buffer(10);
// creates a buffer of length 10

The first two variants simply create a binary representation of the value it received. The last one, however, pre-allocates a buffer of the specified size, making it a useful buffer, especially when reading data from a stream. When using the number constructor of Buffer, it will allocate the memory, but will not fill it with zeros. Instead, the allocated buffer will hold whatever was in memory at the time. If the buffer is not zeroed by using buf.fill(0), it may leak sensitive information like keys, source code, and system info.

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

References

• GitHub Release
• GitHub Issue

• Vulnerable module: ws
• Introduced through: socket.io@0.9.19 and ws@0.4.32

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: karma@0.8.4 > socket.io@0.9.19 > socket.io-client@0.9.16 > ws@0.4.32
• Introduced through: hapi@0.8.4 > ws@0.4.32

Overview

ws is a simple to use websocket client, server and console for node.js.

Affected versions of the package use the cryptographically insecure Math.random() which can produce predictable values and should not be used in security-sensitive context.

Details

Computers are deterministic machines, and as such are unable to produce true randomness. Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNGs) approximate randomness algorithmically, starting with a seed from which subsequent values are calculated.

There are two types of PRNGs: statistical and cryptographic. Statistical PRNGs provide useful statistical properties, but their output is highly predictable and forms an easy to reproduce numeric stream that is unsuitable for use in cases where security depends on generated values being unpredictable. Cryptographic PRNGs address this problem by generating output that is more difficult to predict. For a value to be cryptographically secure, it must be impossible or highly improbable for an attacker to distinguish between it and a truly random value. In general, if a PRNG algorithm is not advertised as being cryptographically secure, then it is probably a statistical PRNG and should not be used in security-sensitive contexts.

You can read more about node's insecure Math.random() in Mike Malone's post.

Remediation

Upgrade ws to version 1.1.2 or higher.

References

• GitHub PR
• GitHub Commit
• Mike Malone's Blog

• Vulnerable module: validator
• Introduced through: validator@0.5.0

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.6.1 > validator@0.5.0

Overview

validator is a module for Node.js contains functionality meant to filter potential XSS attacks (a filter called xss). A method of bypassing the filter via an encoded URL has been publicly disclosed. In general, because the function’s filtering is blacklist-based it is likely that other bypasses will be discovered in the future. Developers are encouraged not to use the xss filter function in this package. The xss() function removes the word "javascript" when contained inside an attribute. However, it does not properly handle cases where characters have been hex-encoded. As a result, it is possible to build an input that bypasses the filter but which the browser will accept as valid JavaScript.

For example, browsers interpret abc as abc.

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.

Remediation

Upgrade to the latest version of this library. However, it should be noted that the fix for this vulnerability was to remove the xss filter functionality. Seek another library to provide proper output encoding.

References

-GitHub Issue

• Vulnerable module: validator
• Introduced through: validator@0.5.0

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.6.1 > validator@0.5.0

Overview

The validator module for Node.js contains functionality meant to filter potential XSS attacks (a filter called xss). Several ways to bypass the filter were discovered. In general, because the function’s filtering is blacklist-based it is likely that other bypasses will be discovered in the future. Developers are encouraged not to use the xss filter function in this package.

Source: Node Security Project

Details

Various inputs that could bypass the filter were discovered:

Improper parsing of nested tags:

<s <onmouseover="alert(1)"> <;s onmouseover="alert(1)">This is a test</s>

Incomplete filtering of javascript: URIs:

<a href="javascriptJ a V a S c R iPt::alert(1)" "<s>">test</a>

UI Redressing:

<div style="z-index: 9999999; background-color: green; width: 100%; height: 100%">
<h1>You have won</h1>Please click the link and enter your login details:
<a href="http://example.com/">http://good.com</a>
</div>

Bypass via Nested Forbidden Strings:

<scrRedirecRedirect 302t 302ipt type="text/javascript">prompt(1);</scrRedirecRedirect 302t 302ipt>

Additional bypasses were discovered by Krzysztof Kotowicz in 2012 when auditing CodeIgniter's XSS filtering function, which this code was based off of.

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.

Remediation

If you are a developer currently using the xss filter function from the validator package, you should consider replacing it with the escape filter function from the same package. This function replaces all instances of angle brackets (<, >), ampersands, and quotation marks, so no HTML tags will be processed.

References

• XSS Filter Bypass in validator Node.js Module
• CodeIgniter <= 2.1.1 xss_clean() Cross Site Scripting filter bypass

• Vulnerable module: validator
• Introduced through: validator@0.5.0

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.6.1 > validator@0.5.0

Overview

validator is a library of string validators and sanitizers.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Buffer Overflow. It used a regular expression (/^(?:[A-Z0-9+\/]{4})*(?:[A-Z0-9+\/]{2}==|[A-Z0-9+\/]{3}=|[A-Z0-9+\/]{4})$/i) in order to validate Base64 strings.

Remediation

Upgrade validator to version 5.0.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Commit
• GitHub Changelog

• Vulnerable module: moment
• Introduced through: emailjs@0.3.16

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.6.1 > emailjs@0.3.16 > moment@1.7.0

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

• Vulnerable module: connect
• Introduced through: express@2.5.11

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.2.1 > express@2.5.11 > connect@1.9.2

Overview

connect is a high performance middleware framework.

Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. It is possible to crash the node server by requesting a url with a trailing backslash in the end.

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 connect to version 2.0.0 or higher.

References

• GitHub Issue
• GitHub Commit

• Vulnerable module: connect
• Introduced through: express@2.5.11

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.2.1 > express@2.5.11 > connect@1.9.2

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: express
• Introduced through: express@2.5.11

Detailed paths

• Introduced through: hapi@0.2.1 > express@2.5.11

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