All the vulnerabilities related to the version 2.0.0 of the package
Denial of Service in ethereumjs-vm
ethereumjs-vm 2.4.0 allows attackers to cause a denial of service (vm.runCode failure and REVERT) via a "code: Buffer.from(my_code, 'hex')" attribute.
Homograph attack allows Unicode lookalike characters to bypass validation.
Attackers can deceive users into sending funds to an unintended address.
https://github.com/cryptocoinjs/base-x/pull/86
semver vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service
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.
Improper Privilege Management in shelljs
shelljs is vulnerable to Improper Privilege Management
Improper Privilege Management in shelljs
Output from the synchronous version of shell.exec() may be visible to other users on the same system. You may be affected if you execute shell.exec() in multi-user Mac, Linux, or WSL environments, or if you execute shell.exec() as the root user.
Other shelljs functions (including the asynchronous version of shell.exec()) are not impacted.
Patched in shelljs 0.8.5
Recommended action is to upgrade to 0.8.5.
https://huntr.dev/bounties/50996581-c08e-4eed-a90e-c0bac082679c/
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
Insecure Credential Storage in web3
All versions of web3 are vulnerable to Insecure Credential Storage. The package stores encrypted wallets in local storage and requires a password to load the wallet. Once the wallet is loaded, the private key is accessible via LocalStorage. Exploiting this vulnerability likely requires a Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability to access the private key.
No fix is currently available. Consider using an alternative module until a fix is made available.
crypto-js PBKDF2 1,000 times weaker than specified in 1993 and 1.3M times weaker than current standard
Crypto-js PBKDF2 is 1,000 times weaker than originally specified in 1993, and at least 1,300,000 times weaker than current industry standard. This is because it both (1) defaults to SHA1, a cryptographic hash algorithm considered insecure since at least 2005 and (2) defaults to one single iteration, a 'strength' or 'difficulty' value specified at 1,000 when specified in 1993. PBKDF2 relies on iteration count as a countermeasure to preimage and collision attacks.
Potential Impact:
Probability / risk analysis / attack enumeration:
Update: PBKDF2 requires a pseudo-random function that takes two inputs, so HMAC-SHA1 is used rather than plain SHA1. HMAC is not affected by length extension attacks. However, by defaulting to a single PBKDF2 iteration, the hashes do not benefit from the extra computational complexity that PBKDF2 is supposed to provide. The resulting hashes therefore have little protection against an offline brute-force attack.
crypto-js has 10,642 public users as displayed on NPM, today October 11th 2023. The number of transient dependents is likely several orders of magnitude higher.
A very rough GitHub search shows 432 files cross GitHub using PBKDF2 in crypto-js in Typescript or JavaScript, but not specifying any number of iterations.
All versions are impacted. This code has been the same since crypto-js was first created.
The issue here is especially egregious because the length extension attack makes useless any secret that might be appended to the plaintext before calculating its signature.
Consider a scheme in which a secret is created for a user's username, and that secret is used to protect e.g. their passwords. Let's say that password is 'fake-password', and their username is 'example-username'.
To encrypt the user password via symmetric encryption we might do encrypt(plaintext: 'fake-password', encryption_key: cryptojs.pbkdf2(value: 'example username' + salt_or_pepper)). By this means, we would, in theory, create an encryption_key that can be determined from the public username, but which requires the secret salt_or_pepper to generate. This is a common scheme for protecting passwords, as exemplified in bcrypt & scrypt. Because the encryption key is symmetric, we can use this derived key to also decrypt the ciphertext.
Because of the length extension issue, if the attacker obtains (via attack 1), a collision with 'example username', the attacker does not need to know salt_or_pepper to decrypt their account data, only their public username.
PBKDF2 is a key-derivation is a key-derivation function that is used for two main purposes: (1) to stretch or squash a variable length password's entropy into a fixed size for consumption by another cryptographic operation and (2) to reduce the chance of downstream operations recovering the password input (for example, for password storage).
Unlike the modern webcrypto standard, crypto-js does not throw an error when a number of iterations is not specified, and defaults to one single iteration. In the year 2000, when PBKDF2 was originally specified, the minimum number of iterations suggested was set at 1,000. Today, OWASP recommends 1,300,000:
https://github.com/brix/crypto-js/blob/4dcaa7afd08f48cd285463b8f9499cdb242605fa/src/pbkdf2.js#L22-L26
No available patch. The package is not maintained.
Consult the OWASP PBKDF2 Cheatsheet. Configure to use SHA256 with at least 250,000 iterations.
This issue was simultaneously submitted to crypto-js and crypto-es on the 23rd of October 2023.
This issue was found in a security review that was not scoped to crypto-js. This report is not an indication that crypto-js has undergone a formal security assessment by the author.
min-document vulnerable to prototype pollution
A vulnerability exists in the 'min-document' package prior to version 2.19.0, stemming from improper handling of namespace operations in the removeAttributeNS method. By processing malicious input involving the proto property, an attacker can manipulate the prototype chain of JavaScript objects, leading to denial of service or arbitrary code execution. This issue arises from insufficient validation of attribute namespace removal operations, allowing unintended modification of critical object prototypes. The vulnerability remains unaddressed in the latest available version.
Server-Side Request Forgery in Request
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.
form-data uses unsafe random function in form-data for choosing boundary
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:
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.
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 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).
For an application to be vulnerable, it must:
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)If an application is vulnerable, this allows an attacker to make arbitrary requests to internal systems.
tough-cookie Prototype Pollution vulnerability
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.
node-fetch forwards secure headers to untrusted sites
node-fetch forwards secure headers such as authorization, www-authenticate, cookie, & cookie2 when redirecting to a untrusted site.