Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

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.

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 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.

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.