Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting @commercial/subtext package, versions <5.1.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-JS-COMMERCIALSUBTEXT-467263
  • published19 Sept 2019
  • disclosed16 Sept 2019
  • creditYurii Chuhaienko

Introduced: 16 Sep 2019

CVE NOT AVAILABLE CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade @commercial/subtext to version 5.1.1 or higher.

Overview

@commercial/subtext is an HTTP payload parsing library.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The package fails to enforce the maxBytes configuration for payloads with chunked encoding that are written to the file system. This allows attackers to send requests with arbitrary payload sizes, which may exhaust system resources.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

version 3.1