Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

The package handlebars before 4.7.7 are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution when selecting certain compiling options to compile templates coming from an untrusted source.

Versions of handlebars prior to 4.0.0 are affected by a cross-site scripting vulnerability when attributes in handlebar templates are not quoted.

Proof of Concept

Template: <a href={{foo}}/>

Input: { 'foo' : 'test.com onload=alert(1)'}

Rendered result: <a href=test.com onload=alert(1)/>

Recommendation

Update to version 4.0.0 or later. Alternatively, ensure that all attributes in handlebars templates are encapsulated with quotes.

The package handlebars before 4.7.7 are vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE) when selecting certain compiling options to compile templates coming from an untrusted source.

The parse method of the JSON5 library before and including version 2.2.1 does not restrict parsing of keys named __proto__, allowing specially crafted strings to pollute the prototype of the resulting object.

This vulnerability pollutes the prototype of the object returned by JSON5.parse and not the global Object prototype, which is the commonly understood definition of Prototype Pollution. However, polluting the prototype of a single object can have significant security impact for an application if the object is later used in trusted operations.

Impact

This vulnerability could allow an attacker to set arbitrary and unexpected keys on the object returned from JSON5.parse. The actual impact will depend on how applications utilize the returned object and how they filter unwanted keys, but could include denial of service, cross-site scripting, elevation of privilege, and in extreme cases, remote code execution.

Mitigation

This vulnerability is patched in json5 v2.2.2 and later. A patch has also been backported for json5 v1 in versions v1.0.2 and later.

Details

Suppose a developer wants to allow users and admins to perform some risky operation, but they want to restrict what non-admins can do. To accomplish this, they accept a JSON blob from the user, parse it using JSON5.parse, confirm that the provided data does not set some sensitive keys, and then performs the risky operation using the validated data:

const JSON5 = require('json5');

const doSomethingDangerous = (props) => {
  if (props.isAdmin) {
    console.log('Doing dangerous thing as admin.');
  } else {
    console.log('Doing dangerous thing as user.');
  }
};

const secCheckKeysSet = (obj, searchKeys) => {
  let searchKeyFound = false;
  Object.keys(obj).forEach((key) => {
    if (searchKeys.indexOf(key) > -1) {
      searchKeyFound = true;
    }
  });
  return searchKeyFound;
};

const props = JSON5.parse('{"foo": "bar"}');
if (!secCheckKeysSet(props, ['isAdmin', 'isMod'])) {
  doSomethingDangerous(props); // "Doing dangerous thing as user."
} else {
  throw new Error('Forbidden...');
}

If the user attempts to set the isAdmin key, their request will be rejected:

const props = JSON5.parse('{"foo": "bar", "isAdmin": true}');
if (!secCheckKeysSet(props, ['isAdmin', 'isMod'])) {
  doSomethingDangerous(props);
} else {
  throw new Error('Forbidden...'); // Error: Forbidden...
}

However, users can instead set the __proto__ key to {"isAdmin": true}. JSON5 will parse this key and will set the isAdmin key on the prototype of the returned object, allowing the user to bypass the security check and run their request as an admin:

const props = JSON5.parse('{"foo": "bar", "__proto__": {"isAdmin": true}}');
if (!secCheckKeysSet(props, ['isAdmin', 'isMod'])) {
  doSomethingDangerous(props); // "Doing dangerous thing as admin."
} else {
  throw new Error('Forbidden...');
}

lodash versions prior to 4.17.21 are vulnerable to Command Injection via the template function.

Versions of lodash before 4.17.11 are vulnerable to prototype pollution.

The vulnerable functions are 'defaultsDeep', 'merge', and 'mergeWith' which allow a malicious user to modify the prototype of Object via {constructor: {prototype: {...}}} causing the addition or modification of an existing property that will exist on all objects.

Recommendation

Update to version 4.17.11 or later.

Versions of lodash before 4.17.5 are vulnerable to prototype pollution.

The vulnerable functions are 'defaultsDeep', 'merge', and 'mergeWith' which allow a malicious user to modify the prototype of Object via __proto__ causing the addition or modification of an existing property that will exist on all objects.

Recommendation

Update to version 4.17.5 or later.

Versions of lodash before 4.17.12 are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The function defaultsDeep allows a malicious user to modify the prototype of Object via {constructor: {prototype: {...}}} causing the addition or modification of an existing property that will exist on all objects.

Recommendation

Update to version 4.17.12 or later.

Versions of lodash prior to 4.17.19 are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution. The functions pick, set, setWith, update, updateWith, and zipObjectDeep allow a malicious user to modify the prototype of Object if the property identifiers are user-supplied. Being affected by this issue requires manipulating objects based on user-provided property values or arrays.

This vulnerability causes the addition or modification of an existing property that will exist on all objects and may lead to Denial of Service or Code Execution under specific circumstances.

A vulnerability was found in the minimatch package. This flaw allows a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) when calling the braceExpand function with specific arguments, resulting in a Denial of Service.

Affected versions of minimatch are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service attacks when user input is passed into the pattern argument of minimatch(path, pattern).

Proof of Concept

var minimatch = require(“minimatch”);

// utility function for generating long strings
var genstr = function (len, chr) {
  var result = “”;
  for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
    result = result + chr;
  }
  return result;
}

var exploit = “[!” + genstr(1000000, “\\”) + “A”;

// minimatch exploit.
console.log(“starting minimatch”);
minimatch(“foo”, exploit);
console.log(“finishing minimatch”);

Recommendation

Update to version 3.0.2 or later.

Versions of js-yaml prior to 3.13.0 are vulnerable to Denial of Service. By parsing a carefully-crafted YAML file, the node process stalls and may exhaust system resources leading to a Denial of Service.

Recommendation

Upgrade to version 3.13.0.

Versions of js-yaml prior to 3.13.1 are vulnerable to Code Injection. The load() function may execute arbitrary code injected through a malicious YAML file. Objects that have toString as key, JavaScript code as value and are used as explicit mapping keys allow attackers to execute the supplied code through the load() function. The safeLoad() function is unaffected.

An example payload is { toString: !<tag:yaml.org,2002:js/function> 'function (){return Date.now()}' } : 1 which returns the object { "1553107949161": 1 }

Recommendation

Upgrade to version 3.13.1.

The package underscore from 1.13.0-0 and before 1.13.0-2, from 1.3.2 and before 1.12.1 are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution via the template function, particularly when a variable property is passed as an argument as it is not sanitized.

A prototype pollution vulnerability affects all versions of package pathval under 1.1.1.

Affected versions of request will disclose local system memory to remote systems in certain circumstances. When a multipart request is made, and the type of body is number, then a buffer of that size will be allocated and sent to the remote server as the body.

Proof of Concept

var request = require('request');
var http = require('http');

var serveFunction = function (req, res){
	req.on('data', function (data) {
            console.log(data)
        });
	res.end();
};
var server = http.createServer(serveFunction);
server.listen(8000);

request({
	method: "POST",
	uri: 'http://localhost:8000',
	multipart: [{body:500}]
},function(err,res,body){});

Recommendation

Update to version 2.68.0 or later

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.

Versions prior to 1.0.0 of qs are affected by a denial of service vulnerability that results from excessive recursion in parsing a deeply nested JSON string.

Recommendation

Update to version 1.0.0 or later

Affected version of qs are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution because it is possible to bypass the protection. The qs.parse function fails to properly prevent an object's prototype to be altered when parsing arbitrary input. Input containing [ or ] may bypass the prototype pollution protection and alter the Object prototype. This allows attackers to override properties that will exist in all objects, which may lead to Denial of Service or Remote Code Execution in specific circumstances.

Recommendation

Upgrade to 6.0.4, 6.1.2, 6.2.3, 6.3.2 or later.

qs before 6.10.3 allows attackers to cause a Node process hang because an __ proto__ key can be used. In many typical web framework use cases, an unauthenticated remote attacker can place the attack payload in the query string of the URL that is used to visit the application, such as a[__proto__]=b&a[__proto__]&a[length]=100000000. The fix was backported to qs 6.9.7, 6.8.3, 6.7.3, 6.6.1, 6.5.3, 6.4.1, 6.3.3, and 6.2.4.

Versions prior to 1.0 of qs are affected by a denial of service condition. This condition is triggered by parsing a crafted string that deserializes into very large sparse arrays, resulting in the process running out of memory and eventually crashing.

Recommendation

Update to version 1.0.0 or later.

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().

Versions of hawk prior to 3.1.3, or 4.x prior to 4.1.1 are affected by a regular expression denial of service vulnerability related to excessively long headers and URI's.

Recommendation

Update to hawk version 4.1.1 or later.

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.

Summary

form-data uses Math.random() to select a boundary value for multipart form-encoded data. This can lead to a security issue if an attacker:

1. can observe other values produced by Math.random in the target application, and
2. can control one field of a request made using form-data

Because the values of Math.random() are pseudo-random and predictable (see: https://blog.securityevaluators.com/hacking-the-javascript-lottery-80cc437e3b7f), an attacker who can observe a few sequential values can determine the state of the PRNG and predict future values, includes those used to generate form-data's boundary value. The allows the attacker to craft a value that contains a boundary value, allowing them to inject additional parameters into the request.

This is largely the same vulnerability as was recently found in undici by parrot409 -- I'm not affiliated with that researcher but want to give credit where credit is due! My PoC is largely based on their work.

Details

The culprit is this line here: https://github.com/form-data/form-data/blob/426ba9ac440f95d1998dac9a5cd8d738043b048f/lib/form_data.js#L347

An attacker who is able to predict the output of Math.random() can predict this boundary value, and craft a payload that contains the boundary value, followed by another, fully attacker-controlled field. This is roughly equivalent to any sort of improper escaping vulnerability, with the caveat that the attacker must find a way to observe other Math.random() values generated by the application to solve for the state of the PRNG. However, Math.random() is used in all sorts of places that might be visible to an attacker (including by form-data itself, if the attacker can arrange for the vulnerable application to make a request to an attacker-controlled server using form-data, such as a user-controlled webhook -- the attacker could observe the boundary values from those requests to observe the Math.random() outputs). A common example would be a x-request-id header added by the server. These sorts of headers are often used for distributed tracing, to correlate errors across the frontend and backend. Math.random() is a fine place to get these sorts of IDs (in fact, opentelemetry uses Math.random for this purpose)

PoC

PoC here: https://github.com/benweissmann/CVE-2025-7783-poc

Instructions are in that repo. It's based on the PoC from https://hackerone.com/reports/2913312 but simplified somewhat; the vulnerable application has a more direct side-channel from which to observe Math.random() values (a separate endpoint that happens to include a randomly-generated request ID).

Impact

For an application to be vulnerable, it must:

• Use form-data to send data including user-controlled data to some other system. The attacker must be able to do something malicious by adding extra parameters (that were not intended to be user-controlled) to this request. Depending on the target system's handling of repeated parameters, the attacker might be able to overwrite values in addition to appending values (some multipart form handlers deal with repeats by overwriting values instead of representing them as an array)
• Reveal values of Math.random(). It's easiest if the attacker can observe multiple sequential values, but more complex math could recover the PRNG state to some degree of confidence with non-sequential values.

If an application is vulnerable, this allows an attacker to make arbitrary requests to internal systems.

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.

Affected versions of http-signature contain a vulnerability which can allow an attacker in a privileged network position to modify header names and change the meaning of the request, without requiring an updated signature.

This problem occurs because vulnerable versions of http-signature sign the contents of headers, but not the header names.

Proof of Concept

Consider this to be the initial, untampered request:

POST /pay HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:31:40 GMT
X-Payment-Source: src@money.com
X-Payment-Destination: dst@money.com
Authorization: Signature keyId="Test",algorithm="rsa-sha256",headers="x-payment-source x-payment-destination" MDyO5tSvin5...

And the request is intercepted and tampered as follows:

X-Payment-Source: dst@money.com // Emails switched
X-Payment-Destination: src@money.com
Authorization: Signature keyId="Test",algorithm="rsa-sha256",headers="x-payment-destination x-payment-source" MDyO5tSvin5...

In the resulting responses, both requests would pass signature verification without issue.

src@money.com\n
dst@money.com\n

Recommendation

Update to version 0.10.0 or higher.

Impact

What kind of vulnerability is it?

Denial of service.

The regular expression inline.reflinkSearch may cause catastrophic backtracking against some strings. PoC is the following.

import * as marked from 'marked';

console.log(marked.parse(`[x]: 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?

• https://marked.js.org/using_advanced#workers
• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Regular_expression_Denial_of_Service_-_ReDoS

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in marked

marked version 0.3.6 and earlier is vulnerable to an XSS attack in the data: URI parser.

Versions 0.3.0 and earlier of marked are affected by two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, even when sanitize: true is set.

The attack vectors for this vulnerability are GFM Codeblocks and JavaScript URLs.

Recommendation

Upgrade to version 0.3.1 or later.

Versions 0.3.2 and earlier of marked are affected by a cross-site scripting vulnerability even when sanitize:true is set.

Proof of Concept ( IE10 Compatibility Mode Only )

[xss link](vbscript:alert(1))

will get a link

<a href="vbscript:alert(1)">xss link</a>

Recommendation

Update to version 0.3.3 or later.

Versions 0.3.3 and earlier of marked are affected by a regular expression denial of service ( ReDoS ) vulnerability when passed inputs that reach the em inline rule.

Recommendation

Update to version 0.3.4 or later.

Marked prior to version 0.3.17 is vulnerable to a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attack due to catastrophic backtracking in several regular expressions used for parsing HTML tags and markdown links. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by providing specially crafted markdown input, such as deeply nested or repetitively structured brackets or tag attributes, which cause the parser to hang and lead to a Denial of Service.

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?

• https://marked.js.org/using_advanced#workers
• https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Regular_expression_Denial_of_Service_-_ReDoS

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in marked

Affected versions of marked are susceptible to a cross-site scripting vulnerability in link components when sanitize:true is configured.

Proof of Concept

This flaw exists because link URIs containing HTML entities get processed in an abnormal manner. Any HTML Entities get parsed on a best-effort basis and included in the resulting link, while if that parsing fails that character is omitted.

For example:

A link URI such as

javascript&#x58document;alert(1)

Renders a valid link that when clicked will execute alert(1).

Recommendation

Update to version 0.3.6 or later.

Affected versions of marked are vulnerable to a regular expression denial of service.

The amplification in this vulnerability is significant, with 1,000 characters resulting in the event loop being blocked for around 6 seconds.

Recommendation

Update to version 0.3.9 or later.

A vulnerability has been identified in the Express response.links function, allowing for arbitrary resource injection in the Link header when unsanitized data is used.

The issue arises from improper sanitization in Link header values, which can allow a combination of characters like ,, ;, and <> to preload malicious resources.

This vulnerability is especially relevant for dynamic parameters.

Vulnerable versions of express do not specify a charset field in the content-type header while displaying 400 level response messages. The lack of enforcing user's browser to set correct charset, could be leveraged by an attacker to perform a cross-site scripting attack, using non-standard encodings, like UTF-7.

Recommendation

For express 3.x, update express to version 3.11 or later. For express 4.x, update express to version 4.5 or later.

Impact

In express <4.20.0, passing untrusted user input - even after sanitizing it - to response.redirect() may execute untrusted code

Patches

this issue is patched in express 4.20.0

Workarounds

users are encouraged to upgrade to the patched version of express, but otherwise can workaround this issue by making sure any untrusted inputs are safe, ideally by validating them against an explicit allowlist

Details

successful exploitation of this vector requires the following:

1. The attacker MUST control the input to response.redirect()
2. express MUST NOT redirect before the template appears
3. the browser MUST NOT complete redirection before:
4. the user MUST click on the link in the template

Impact

Versions of Express.js prior to 4.19.2 and pre-release alpha and beta versions before 5.0.0-beta.3 are affected by an open redirect vulnerability using malformed URLs.

When a user of Express performs a redirect using a user-provided URL Express performs an encode using encodeurl on the contents before passing it to the location header. This can cause malformed URLs to be evaluated in unexpected ways by common redirect allow list implementations in Express applications, leading to an Open Redirect via bypass of a properly implemented allow list.

The main method impacted is res.location() but this is also called from within res.redirect().

Patches

https://github.com/expressjs/express/commit/0867302ddbde0e9463d0564fea5861feb708c2dd https://github.com/expressjs/express/commit/0b746953c4bd8e377123527db11f9cd866e39f94

An initial fix went out with express@4.19.0, we then patched a feature regression in 4.19.1 and added improved handling for the bypass in 4.19.2.

Workarounds

The fix for this involves pre-parsing the url string with either require('node:url').parse or new URL. These are steps you can take on your own before passing the user input string to res.location or res.redirect.

References

https://github.com/expressjs/express/pull/5539 https://github.com/koajs/koa/issues/1800 https://expressjs.com/en/4x/api.html#res.location

Versions of send prior to 0.11.2 are affected by an information leakage vulnerability which may allow an attacker to enumerate paths on the server filesystem.

Recommendation

Update to version 0.11.1 or later.

Impact

passing untrusted user input - even after sanitizing it - to SendStream.redirect() may execute untrusted code

Patches

this issue is patched in send 0.19.0

Workarounds

users are encouraged to upgrade to the patched version of express, but otherwise can workaround this issue by making sure any untrusted inputs are safe, ideally by validating them against an explicit allowlist

Details

successful exploitation of this vector requires the following:

1. The attacker MUST control the input to response.redirect()
2. express MUST NOT redirect before the template appears
3. the browser MUST NOT complete redirection before:
4. the user MUST click on the link in the template

Versions 0.8.3 and earlier of send are affected by a directory traversal vulnerability. When relying on the root option to restrict file access it may be possible for an application consumer to escape out of the restricted directory and access files in a similarly named directory.

For example, static(_dirname + '/public') would allow access to _dirname + '/public-restricted'.

Recommendation

Update to version 0.8.4 or later.

Affected versions of fresh are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service when parsing specially crafted user input.

Recommendation

Update to version 0.5.2 or later.

Impact

The cookie name could be used to set other fields of the cookie, resulting in an unexpected cookie value. For example, serialize("userName=<script>alert('XSS3')</script>; Max-Age=2592000; a", value) would result in "userName=<script>alert('XSS3')</script>; Max-Age=2592000; a=test", setting userName cookie to <script> and ignoring value.

A similar escape can be used for path and domain, which could be abused to alter other fields of the cookie.

Patches

Upgrade to 0.7.0, which updates the validation for name, path, and domain.

Workarounds

Avoid passing untrusted or arbitrary values for these fields, ensure they are set by the application instead of user input.

References

• https://github.com/jshttp/cookie/pull/167

Affected versions of cookie-signature are vulnerable to timing attacks as a result of using a fail-early comparison instead of a constant-time comparison.

Timing attacks remove the exponential increase in entropy gained from increased secret length, by providing per-character feedback on the correctness of a guess via miniscule timing differences.

Under favorable network conditions, an attacker can exploit this to guess the secret in no more than charset*length guesses, instead of charset^length guesses required were the timing attack not present.

Recommendation

Update to 1.0.4 or later.