Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting muhammara package, versions <2.6.1 >=3.0.0 <3.1.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.23% (62nd percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JS-MUHAMMARA-3060320
  • published 31 Oct 2022
  • disclosed 24 Oct 2022
  • credit Marc Hassan, Julian Hille

How to fix?

Upgrade muhammara to version 2.6.1, 3.1.1 or higher.

Overview

muhammara is a Create, read and modify PDF files and streams. A drop in replacement for hummusjs PDF library

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) when supplied with a maliciously crafted PDF file to be parsed.

PoC

var pdfReader = muhammara.createReader(
__dirname + "/TestMaterials/BrokenPdfBadHeader.txt"
);

```js
var pdfReader = hummus.createReader(
__dirname + "/TestMaterials/BrokenPdfBadHeader.txt"
);

PDF file contents:

%PDF-1.4
%%EOF

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
Expand this section

Snyk

Recommended
7.5 high
  • Attack Vector (AV)
    Network
  • Attack Complexity (AC)
    Low
  • Privileges Required (PR)
    None
  • User Interaction (UI)
    None
  • Scope (S)
    Unchanged
  • Confidentiality (C)
    None
  • Integrity (I)
    None
  • Availability (A)
    High
Expand this section

NVD

7.5 high