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GHSA-rrrm-qjm4-v8hf CVE-2022-21680

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in marked

High npm
Severity
7.5 / 10
High · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS)
2.85%
Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 86.72% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited
No
Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness
CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
Fix
4.0.10
Upgrade marked to this version or later

Description

Impact

What kind of vulnerability is it?

Denial of service.

The regular expression block.def may cause catastrophic backtracking against some strings. PoC is the following.

import * as marked from "marked";

marked.parse(`[x]:${' '.repeat(1500)}x ${' '.repeat(1500)} x`);

Who is impacted?

Anyone who runs untrusted markdown through marked and does not use a worker with a time limit.

Patches

Has the problem been patched?

Yes

What versions should users upgrade to?

4.0.10

Workarounds

Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?

Do not run untrusted markdown through marked or run marked on a worker thread and set a reasonable time limit to prevent draining resources.

References

Are there any links users can visit to find out more?

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

Affected versions

npm

PackageVulnerableFixed in
marked
< 4.0.10
4.0.10

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.

marked npm → 4.0.10

npm
npm install marked@4.0.10
yarn
yarn add marked@4.0.10
pnpm
pnpm add marked@4.0.10

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.

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

Advisories

Packages

Other links

Timeline

  1. Published
  2. Last updated by the source
  3. Latest EPSS score
AdvisorySeverityWhy it's related
GHSA-6v9c-7cg6-27q7
Marked Vulnerable to OOM Denial of Service via Infinite Recursion in marked Tokenizer
High Also affects marked
GHSA-p9wx-2529-fp83
Marked allows Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks
Medium Also affects marked
GHSA-5v2h-r2cx-5xgj
Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in marked
High Also affects marked
GHSA-4r62-v4vq-hr96
Regular Expression Denial of Service (REDoS) in Marked
High Also affects marked
GHSA-ch52-vgq2-943f
Regular Expression Denial of Service in marked
Low Also affects marked
GHSA-9cw2-jqp5-7x39
Multiple Content Injection Vulnerabilities in marked
Medium Also affects marked
GHSA-xf5p-87ch-gxw2
Marked ReDoS due to email addresses being evaluated in quadratic time
Medium Also affects marked
GHSA-vfvf-mqq8-rwqc
Sanitization bypass using HTML Entities in marked
Medium Also affects marked
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