Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

Summary

esbuild allows any websites to send any request to the development server and read the response due to default CORS settings.

Details

esbuild sets Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header to all requests, including the SSE connection, which allows any websites to send any request to the development server and read the response.

https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/blob/df815ac27b84f8b34374c9182a93c94718f8a630/pkg/api/serve_other.go#L121 https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/blob/df815ac27b84f8b34374c9182a93c94718f8a630/pkg/api/serve_other.go#L363

Attack scenario:

1. The attacker serves a malicious web page (http://malicious.example.com).
2. The user accesses the malicious web page.
3. The attacker sends a fetch('http://127.0.0.1:8000/main.js') request by JS in that malicious web page. This request is normally blocked by same-origin policy, but that's not the case for the reasons above.
4. The attacker gets the content of http://127.0.0.1:8000/main.js.

In this scenario, I assumed that the attacker knows the URL of the bundle output file name. But the attacker can also get that information by

• Fetching /index.html: normally you have a script tag here
• Fetching /assets: it's common to have a assets directory when you have JS files and CSS files in a different directory and the directory listing feature tells the attacker the list of files
• Connecting /esbuild SSE endpoint: the SSE endpoint sends the URL path of the changed files when the file is changed (new EventSource('/esbuild').addEventListener('change', e => console.log(e.type, e.data)))
• Fetching URLs in the known file: once the attacker knows one file, the attacker can know the URLs imported from that file

The scenario above fetches the compiled content, but if the victim has the source map option enabled, the attacker can also get the non-compiled content by fetching the source map file.

PoC

1. Download reproduction.zip
2. Extract it and move to that directory
3. Run npm i
4. Run npm run watch
5. Run fetch('http://127.0.0.1:8000/app.js').then(r => r.text()).then(content => console.log(content)) in a different website's dev tools.

Impact

Users using the serve feature may get the source code stolen by malicious websites.

The NPM package micromatch prior to version 4.0.8 is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The vulnerability occurs in micromatch.braces() in index.js because the pattern .* will greedily match anything. By passing a malicious payload, the pattern matching will keep backtracking to the input while it doesn't find the closing bracket. As the input size increases, the consumption time will also increase until it causes the application to hang or slow down. There was a merged fix but further testing shows the issue persisted prior to https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch/pull/266. This issue should be mitigated by using a safe pattern that won't start backtracking the regular expression due to greedy matching.

The NPM package braces fails to limit the number of characters it can handle, which could lead to Memory Exhaustion. In lib/parse.js, if a malicious user sends "imbalanced braces" as input, the parsing will enter a loop, which will cause the program to start allocating heap memory without freeing it at any moment of the loop. Eventually, the JavaScript heap limit is reached, and the program will crash.