Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting ecstatic package, versions <1.4.0

ecstatic is a simple static file server middleware. Use it with a raw http server, express/connect or on the CLI.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The vulnerability is caused by the combination of two bugs. First, the underlying V8 engine throws an exception when processing the specially crafted date, instead of stating the date is invalid as it should. Second, the ecstatic server does not handle the exception, triggering the crash.

Upgrading Ecstatic will address the second issue and thus fix the vulnerability.

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

• BUGS.CHROMIUM.ORG
• GitHub PR