Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

Versions of the npm CLI prior to 6.13.4 are vulnerable to a Global node_modules Binary Overwrite. It fails to prevent existing globally-installed binaries to be overwritten by other package installations.

For example, if a package was installed globally and created a serve binary, any subsequent installs of packages that also create a serve binary would overwrite the first binary. This will not overwrite system binaries but only binaries put into the global node_modules directory.

This behavior is still allowed in local installations and also through install scripts. This vulnerability bypasses a user using the --ignore-scripts install option.

Recommendation

Upgrade to version 6.13.4 or later.

Versions of the npm CLI prior to 6.14.6 are vulnerable to an information exposure vulnerability through log files. The CLI supports URLs like <protocol>://[<user>[:<password>]@]<hostname>[:<port>][:][/]<path>. The password value is not redacted and is printed to stdout and also to any generated log files.

Versions of the npm CLI prior to 6.13.3 are vulnerable to an Arbitrary File Write. It fails to prevent access to folders outside of the intended node_modules folder through the bin field. A properly constructed entry in the package.json bin field would allow a package publisher to create files on a user's system when the package is installed. It is only possible to affect files that the user running npm install has access to and it is not possible to over write files that already exist on disk.

This behavior is still possible through install scripts. This vulnerability bypasses a user using the --ignore-scripts install option.

Recommendation

Upgrade to version 6.13.3 or later.

An issue was discovered in an npm 5.7.0 2018-02-21 pre-release (marked as "next: 5.7.0" and therefore automatically installed by an "npm upgrade -g npm" command, and also announced in the vendor's blog without mention of pre-release status). It might allow local users to bypass intended filesystem access restrictions because ownerships of /etc and /usr directories are being changed unexpectedly, related to a "correctMkdir" issue.

Versions of the npm CLI prior to 6.13.3 are vulnerable to a symlink reference outside of node_modules. It is possible for packages to create symlinks to files outside of thenode_modules folder through the bin field upon installation. A properly constructed entry in the package.json bin field would allow a package publisher to create a symlink pointing to arbitrary files on a user’s system when the package is installed. Only files accessible by the user running the npm install are affected.

This behavior is still possible through install scripts. This vulnerability bypasses a user using the --ignore-scripts install option.

Recommendation

Upgrade to version 6.13.3 or later.

Impact

Arbitrary File Creation, Arbitrary File Overwrite, Arbitrary Code Execution

node-tar aims to prevent extraction of absolute file paths by turning absolute paths into relative paths when the preservePaths flag is not set to true. This is achieved by stripping the absolute path root from any absolute file paths contained in a tar file. For example /home/user/.bashrc would turn into home/user/.bashrc.

This logic was insufficient when file paths contained repeated path roots such as ////home/user/.bashrc. node-tar would only strip a single path root from such paths. When given an absolute file path with repeating path roots, the resulting path (e.g. ///home/user/.bashrc) would still resolve to an absolute path, thus allowing arbitrary file creation and overwrite.

Patches

3.2.2 || 4.4.14 || 5.0.6 || 6.1.1

NOTE: an adjacent issue CVE-2021-32803 affects this release level. Please ensure you update to the latest patch levels that address CVE-2021-32803 as well if this adjacent issue affects your node-tar use case.

Workarounds

Users may work around this vulnerability without upgrading by creating a custom onentry method which sanitizes the entry.path or a filter method which removes entries with absolute paths.

const path = require('path')
const tar = require('tar')

tar.x({
  file: 'archive.tgz',
  // either add this function...
  onentry: (entry) => {
    if (path.isAbsolute(entry.path)) {
      entry.path = sanitizeAbsolutePathSomehow(entry.path)
      entry.absolute = path.resolve(entry.path)
    }
  },

  // or this one
  filter: (file, entry) => {
    if (path.isAbsolute(entry.path)) {
      return false
    } else {
      return true
    }
  }
})

Users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch versions, rather than attempt to sanitize tar input themselves.

Impact

Arbitrary File Creation, Arbitrary File Overwrite, Arbitrary Code Execution

node-tar aims to guarantee that any file whose location would be outside of the extraction target directory is not extracted. This is, in part, accomplished by sanitizing absolute paths of entries within the archive, skipping archive entries that contain .. path portions, and resolving the sanitized paths against the extraction target directory.

This logic was insufficient on Windows systems when extracting tar files that contained a path that was not an absolute path, but specified a drive letter different from the extraction target, such as C:some\path. If the drive letter does not match the extraction target, for example D:\extraction\dir, then the result of path.resolve(extractionDirectory, entryPath) would resolve against the current working directory on the C: drive, rather than the extraction target directory.

Additionally, a .. portion of the path could occur immediately after the drive letter, such as C:../foo, and was not properly sanitized by the logic that checked for .. within the normalized and split portions of the path.

This only affects users of node-tar on Windows systems.

Patches

4.4.18 || 5.0.10 || 6.1.9

Workarounds

There is no reasonable way to work around this issue without performing the same path normalization procedures that node-tar now does.

Users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest patched versions of node-tar, rather than attempt to sanitize paths themselves.

Fix

The fixed versions strip path roots from all paths prior to being resolved against the extraction target folder, even if such paths are not "absolute".

Additionally, a path starting with a drive letter and then two dots, like c:../, would bypass the check for .. path portions. This is checked properly in the patched versions.

Finally, a defense in depth check is added, such that if the entry.absolute is outside of the extraction taret, and we are not in preservePaths:true mode, a warning is raised on that entry, and it is skipped. Currently, it is believed that this check is redundant, but it did catch some oversights in development.

Description:

During some analysis today on npm's node-tar package I came across the folder creation process, Basicly if you provide node-tar with a path like this ./a/b/c/foo.txt it would create every folder and sub-folder here a, b and c until it reaches the last folder to create foo.txt, In-this case I noticed that there's no validation at all on the amount of folders being created, that said we're actually able to CPU and memory consume the system running node-tar and even crash the nodejs client within few seconds of running it using a path with too many sub-folders inside

Steps To Reproduce:

You can reproduce this issue by downloading the tar file I provided in the resources and using node-tar to extract it, you should get the same behavior as the video

Proof Of Concept:

Here's a video show-casing the exploit:

Impact

Denial of service by crashing the nodejs client when attempting to parse a tar archive, make it run out of heap memory and consuming server CPU and memory resources

Report resources

payload.txt archeive.tar.gz

Note

This report was originally reported to GitHub bug bounty program, they asked me to report it to you a month ago

A TOCTOU issue in the chownr package before 1.1.0 for Node.js 10.10 could allow a local attacker to trick it into descending into unintended directories via symlink attacks.

Versions of the package semver before 7.5.2 on the 7.x branch, before 6.3.1 on the 6.x branch, and all other versions before 5.7.2 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the function new Range, when untrusted user data is provided as a range.

The request package through 2.88.2 for Node.js and the @cypress/request package prior to 3.0.0 allow a bypass of SSRF mitigations via an attacker-controller server that does a cross-protocol redirect (HTTP to HTTPS, or HTTPS to HTTP).

NOTE: The request package is no longer supported by the maintainer.

A buffer over-read vulnerability exists in bl <4.0.3, <3.0.1, <2.2.1, and <1.2.3 which could allow an attacker to supply user input (even typed) that if it ends up in consume() argument and can become negative, the BufferList state can be corrupted, tricking it into exposing uninitialized memory via regular .slice() calls.

Hawk is an HTTP authentication scheme providing mechanisms for making authenticated HTTP requests with partial cryptographic verification of the request and response, covering the HTTP method, request URI, host, and optionally the request payload. Hawk used a regular expression to parse Host HTTP header (Hawk.utils.parseHost()), which was subject to regular expression DoS attack - meaning each added character in the attacker's input increases the computation time exponentially. parseHost() was patched in 9.0.1 to use built-in URL class to parse hostname instead.Hawk.authenticate() accepts options argument. If that contains host and port, those would be used instead of a call to utils.parseHost().

hoek versions prior to 8.5.1, and 9.x prior to 9.0.3 are vulnerable to prototype pollution in the clone function. If an object with the proto key is passed to clone() the key is converted to a prototype. This issue has been patched in version 9.0.3, and backported to 8.5.1.

Versions of hoek prior to 4.2.1 and 5.0.3 are vulnerable to prototype pollution.

The merge function, and the applyToDefaults and applyToDefaultsWithShallow functions which leverage merge behind the scenes, are vulnerable to a prototype pollution attack when provided an unvalidated payload created from a JSON string containing the __proto__ property.

This can be demonstrated like so:

var Hoek = require('hoek');
var malicious_payload = '{"__proto__":{"oops":"It works !"}}';

var a = {};
console.log("Before : " + a.oops);
Hoek.merge({}, JSON.parse(malicious_payload));
console.log("After : " + a.oops);

This type of attack can be used to overwrite existing properties causing a potential denial of service.

Recommendation

Update to version 4.2.1, 5.0.3 or later.

Versions of the package tough-cookie before 4.1.3 are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution due to improper handling of Cookies when using CookieJar in rejectPublicSuffixes=false mode. This issue arises from the manner in which the objects are initialized.

Versions of tunnel-agent before 0.6.0 are vulnerable to memory exposure.

This is exploitable if user supplied input is provided to the auth value and is a number.

Proof-of-concept:

require('request')({
  method: 'GET',
  uri: 'http://www.example.com',
  tunnel: true,
  proxy:{
    protocol: 'http:',
    host:'127.0.0.1',
    port:8080,
    auth:USERSUPPLIEDINPUT // number
  }
});

Recommendation

Update to version 0.6.0 or later.

The npm package hosted-git-info before 3.0.8 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via regular expression shortcutMatch in the fromUrl function in index.js. The affected regular expression exhibits polynomial worst-case time complexity

This affects the package npm-user-validate before 1.0.1. The regex that validates user emails took exponentially longer to process long input strings beginning with @ characters.

npm-user-validate before version 1.0.1 is vulnerable to a Regular Expression Denial of Service (REDos). The regex that validates user emails took exponentially longer to process long input strings beginning with @ characters.

Impact

The issue affects the email function. If you use this function to process arbitrary user input with no character limit the application may be susceptible to Denial of Service.

Patches

The issue is patched in version 1.0.1 by improving the regular expression used and also enforcing a 254 character limit.

Workarounds

Restrict the character length to a reasonable degree before passing a value to .emal(); Also, consider doing a more rigorous sanitizing/validation beforehand.