CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-34104

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

Published: Jun 06, 2023 | Modified: Jan 22, 2024
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

fast-xml-parser is an open source, pure javascript xml parser. fast-xml-parser allows special characters in entity names, which are not escaped or sanitized. Since the entity name is used for creating a regex for searching and replacing entities in the XML body, an attacker can abuse it for denial of service (DoS) attacks. By crafting an entity name that results in an intentionally bad performing regex and utilizing it in the entity replacement step of the parser, this can cause the parser to stall for an indefinite amount of time. This problem has been resolved in v4.2.4. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should avoid using DOCTYPE parsing by setting the processEntities: false option.

Weakness

The product uses a regular expression with an inefficient, possibly exponential worst-case computational complexity that consumes excessive CPU cycles.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Fast-xml-parser Fast-xml-parser_project * 4.2.4 (excluding)

Extended Description

      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.

Potential Mitigations

References