A denial of service vulnerability exists in Next.js versions with Partial Prerendering (PPR) enabled when running in minimal mode. The PPR resume endpoint accepts unauthenticated POST requests with the Next-Resume: 1 header and processes attacker-controlled postponed state data. Two closely related vulnerabilities allow an attacker to crash the server process through memory exhaustion:
Unbounded request body buffering: The server buffers the entire POST request body into memory using
Buffer.concat()without enforcing any size limit, allowing arbitrarily large payloads to exhaust available memory.Unbounded decompression (zipbomb): The resume data cache is decompressed using
inflateSync()without limiting the decompressed output size. A small compressed payload can expand to hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes, causing memory exhaustion.
Both attack vectors result in a fatal V8 out-of-memory error (FATAL ERROR: Reached heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory) causing the Node.js process to terminate. The zipbomb variant is particularly dangerous as it can bypass reverse proxy request size limits while still causing large memory allocation on the server.
To be affected you must have an application running with experimental.ppr: true or cacheComponents: true configured along with the NEXT_PRIVATE_MINIMAL_MODE=1 environment variable.
Strongly consider upgrading to 15.6.0-canary.61 or 16.1.5 to reduce risk and prevent availability issues in Next applications.
Weakness
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
Potential Mitigations
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:
The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.
The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.
Related Attack Patterns
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/147.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/227.html
- https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/492.html