The jump from an undefined previous stable version to Express 0.14.0 represents a significant moment in the history of this popular Node.js web framework. Express 0.14.0, released in late 2010, offered developers a Sinatra-inspired approach to building web applications. It provided a more structured and organized way to handle routing, middleware, and request/response cycles compared to using raw Node.js HTTP modules.
For developers familiar with frameworks like Sinatra (Ruby), Express offered a familiar paradigm focused on simplicity and rapid development. Its strength lies in its minimal core, allowing developers to extend functionality with a vast ecosystem of middleware. This modular architecture was a key differentiator, promoting flexibility and tailoring the framework to specific project needs. Routing became cleaner and more manageable, enabling developers to define how the application responded to different HTTP requests (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). The introduction of middleware facilitated tasks such as request parsing, authentication, and session management, streamlining common web development processes.
While the exact features missing from the "undefined" previous stable version are unknown, moving to 0.14.0 likely meant adopting a more refined API, potentially improved performance, and access to a growing community and set of third-party modules. It marked a noteworthy step towards the maturity of Express as a leading framework for Node.js web application development.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 0.14.0 of the package
No Charset in Content-Type Header in express
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.
For express 3.x, update express to version 3.11 or later. For express 4.x, update express to version 4.5 or later.
Express ressource injection
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.
Express.js Open Redirect in malformed URLs
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().
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.
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.
https://github.com/expressjs/express/pull/5539 https://github.com/koajs/koa/issues/1800 https://expressjs.com/en/4x/api.html#res.location
express vulnerable to XSS via response.redirect()
In express <4.20.0, passing untrusted user input - even after sanitizing it - to response.redirect() may execute untrusted code
this issue is patched in express 4.20.0
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
successful exploitation of this vector requires the following:
