Hawk is an HTTP authentication scheme providing mechanisms for making authenticated HTTP requests with partial cryptographic verification of the request and response, covering the HTTP method, request URI, host, and optionally the request payload. Hawk used a regular expression to parse Host HTTP header (Hawk.utils.parseHost()), which was subject to regular expression DoS attack - meaning each added character in the attackers input increases the computation time exponentially. parseHost() was patched in 9.0.1 to use built-in URL class to parse hostname instead. Hawk.authenticate() accepts options argument. If that contains host and port, those would be used instead of a call to utils.parseHost().
The product uses a regular expression with an inefficient, possibly exponential worst-case computational complexity that consumes excessive CPU cycles.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hawk | Mozilla | * | 9.0.1 (excluding) |
Attackers can create crafted inputs that
intentionally cause the regular expression to use
excessive backtracking in a way that causes the CPU
consumption to spike.