Socket.IO versions 0.5.1 and 0.4.1 represent early iterations of a popular library designed for real-time, bidirectional communication between web clients and servers. Both versions, authored by LearnBoost, share the same core description: "Sockets for the rest of us," highlighting their intent to simplify the complexities of WebSocket implementation. They also point to the same GitHub repository as the source code location, indicating a continuous development lineage.
Despite these similarities, the key difference lies in the version नंबर. While not apparent in this specific metadata snippets, upgrading from 0.4.1 to 0.5.1 likely included bug fixes, performance enhancements, and potentially new features or API adjustments. Developers considering these versions should prioritize 0.5.1 due to its inherent advantages of being the newer and presumably more stable release. However, due to the time when versions were released, there is likely a lot of breaking change with the actual releases and it's very important to check the changelog or release notes.
For developers targeting real-time functionality like chat applications, live dashboards, or collaborative tools, Socket.IO offers a valuable abstraction layer over raw WebSockets. The library handles complexities such as connection management, fallback mechanisms for older browsers, and message encoding/decoding. Keep in mind these versions are quite old, so modern equivalents of Socket.IO are recommended and it is extremely likely there are breaking changes.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 0.5.1 of the package
Insecure randomness in socket.io
Affected versions of socket.io depend on Math.random() to create socket IDs, and therefore the IDs are predictable. With enough information on prior IDs, an attacker may be able to guess the socket ID and gain access to socket.io servers without authorization.
Update to v0.9.7 or later.
CORS misconfiguration in socket.io
The package socket.io before 2.4.0 are vulnerable to Insecure Defaults due to CORS Misconfiguration. All domains are whitelisted by default.
socket.io has an unhandled 'error' event
A specially crafted Socket.IO packet can trigger an uncaught exception on the Socket.IO server, thus killing the Node.js process.
node:events:502
throw err; // Unhandled 'error' event
^
Error [ERR_UNHANDLED_ERROR]: Unhandled error. (undefined)
at new NodeError (node:internal/errors:405:5)
at Socket.emit (node:events:500:17)
at /myapp/node_modules/socket.io/lib/socket.js:531:14
at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:77:11) {
code: 'ERR_UNHANDLED_ERROR',
context: undefined
}
| Version range | Needs minor update? |
|------------------|------------------------------------------------|
| 4.6.2...latest | Nothing to do |
| 3.0.0...4.6.1 | Please upgrade to socket.io@4.6.2 (at least) |
| 2.3.0...2.5.0 | Please upgrade to socket.io@2.5.1 |
This issue is fixed by https://github.com/socketio/socket.io/commit/15af22fc22bc6030fcead322c106f07640336115, included in socket.io@4.6.2 (released in May 2023).
The fix was backported in the 2.x branch today: https://github.com/socketio/socket.io/commit/d30630ba10562bf987f4d2b42440fc41a828119c
As a workaround for the affected versions of the socket.io package, you can attach a listener for the "error" event:
io.on("connection", (socket) => {
socket.on("error", () => {
// ...
});
});
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
Thanks a lot to Paul Taylor for the responsible disclosure.