Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting pg-native package, versions <3.0.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    Exploit Maturity
    Proof of concept
    EPSS
    0.07% (33rd percentile)

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-JS-PGNATIVE-2392365
  • published 14 Jun 2022
  • disclosed 3 Feb 2022
  • credit Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Snyk Security Labs

How to fix?

Upgrade pg-native to version 3.0.1 or higher.

Overview

pg-native is a high performance native bindings between node.js and PostgreSQL via libpq with a simple API.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) when the addons attempt to cast the second argument to an array and fail. This happens for every non-array argument passed.

Note: pg-native is a mere binding to npm's libpq library, which in turn has the addons and bindings to the actual C libpq library. This means that problems found in libpq may transitively impact npm's pg-native.

PoC

//pg-native -> poc.js

let Client = require('pg-native') 
let client = new Client(); 
client.connectSync(); 
client.query('some str', 1, function() {});

//libpq -> poc.js

var Libpq = require('libpq') 
const pq = new Libpq(); 
pq.sendQueryParams("some str", 1) 

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