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Regular Expression Denial of Service in websocket-extensions (NPM package)

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Jun 2, 2020 in faye/websocket-extensions-node • Updated Jan 9, 2023

Package

npm websocket-extensions (npm)

Affected versions

< 0.1.4

Patched versions

0.1.4

Description

Impact

The ReDoS flaw allows an attacker to exhaust the server's capacity to process
incoming requests by sending a WebSocket handshake request containing a header
of the following form:

Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: a; b="\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c ...

That is, a header containing an unclosed string parameter value whose content is
a repeating two-byte sequence of a backslash and some other character. The
parser takes exponential time to reject this header as invalid, and this will
block the processing of any other work on the same thread. Thus if you are
running a single-threaded server, such a request can render your service
completely unavailable.

Patches

Users should upgrade to version 0.1.4.

Workarounds

There are no known work-arounds other than disabling any public-facing
WebSocket functionality you are operating.

References

References

@jcoglan jcoglan published to faye/websocket-extensions-node Jun 2, 2020
Reviewed Jun 3, 2020
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Jun 5, 2020
Last updated Jan 9, 2023

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H

EPSS score

0.329%
(71st percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2020-7662

GHSA ID

GHSA-g78m-2chm-r7qv

Source code

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