Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting uws package, versions <0.10.9 >=0.10.0


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS
    0.1% (42nd percentile)

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  • Snyk ID npm:uws:20161013
  • published 17 Oct 2016
  • disclosed 13 Oct 2016
  • credit Luigi Pinca

How to fix?

Upgrade uws to version 0.10.9 or higher.

Overview

uws is Highly scalable WebSocket server & client library. Affected versions of the package are vulnerable to Denial of Service.

It is possible to crash the node process by sending a 256mb websocket message and exceeding V8's maximum string size.

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

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