Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

Summary

Koa uses an evil regex to parse the X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Host HTTP headers. This can be exploited to carry out a Denial-of-Service attack.

PoC

Coming soon.

Impact

This is a Regex Denial-of-Service attack and causes memory exhaustion. The regex should be improved and empty values should not be allowed.

Summary

In koa < 2.16.1 and < 3.0.0-alpha.5, passing untrusted user input to ctx.redirect() even after sanitizing it, may execute javascript code on the user who use the app.

Patches

This issue is patched in 2.16.1 and 3.0.0-alpha.5.

PoC

Coming soon...

Impact

1. Redirect user to another phishing site
2. Make request to another endpoint of the application based on user's cookie
3. Steal user's cookie

Summary

In the latest version of Koa, the back method used for redirect operations adopts an insecure implementation, which uses the user-controllable referrer header as the redirect target.

Details

on the API document https://www.koajs.net/api/response#responseredirecturl-alt, we can see:

response.redirect(url, [alt])

Performs a [302] redirect to url.
The string "back" is specially provided for Referrer support, using alt or "/" when Referrer does not exist.

ctx.redirect('back');
ctx.redirect('back', '/index.html');
ctx.redirect('/login');
ctx.redirect('http://google.com');

however, the "back" method is insecure:

• https://github.com/koajs/koa/blob/master/lib/response.js#L322

  back (alt) {
    const url = this.ctx.get('Referrer') || alt || '/'
    this.redirect(url)
  },

Referrer Header is User-Controlled.

PoC

there is a demo for POC:

const Koa = require('koa')
const serve = require('koa-static')
const Router = require('@koa/router')
const path = require('path')

const app = new Koa()
const router = new Router()

// Serve static files from the public directory
app.use(serve(path.join(__dirname, 'public')))

// Define routes
router.get('/test', ctx => {
  ctx.redirect('back', '/index1.html')
})

router.get('/test2', ctx => {
  ctx.redirect('back')
})

router.get('/', ctx => {
  ctx.body = 'Welcome to the home page! Try accessing /test, /test2'
})

app.use(router.routes())
app.use(router.allowedMethods())

const port = 3000
app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://localhost:${port}`)
}) 

Proof Of Concept

GET /test HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:3000
Referer: http://www.baidu.com
Connection: close


GET /test2 HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:3000
Referer: http://www.baidu.com
Connection: close

Impact

https://learn.snyk.io/lesson/open-redirect/

Affected versions of fresh are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service when parsing specially crafted user input.

Recommendation

Update to version 0.5.2 or later.