Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting hd-wallet package, versions <0.6.0

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) through the Slip10Like derivation method. An attacker can cause the application to enter a prolonged state of non-responsiveness by manipulating the derivation path to trigger excessive iterations in the derivation process.

Note: This is only exploitable if the method is instantiated with curves other than secp256k1 and secp256r1.

This vulnerability can be mitigated by migrating to other derivation methods such as Edwards for the ed25519 curve or Stark for the stark curve, which are both secure and efficient alternatives.

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

• GitHub Commit