Headline
GHSA-73rr-hh4g-fpgx: jsdiff has a Denial of Service vulnerability in parsePatch and applyPatch
Impact
Attempting to parse a patch whose filename headers contain the line break characters \r, \u2028, or \u2029 can cause the parsePatch method to enter an infinite loop. It then consumes memory without limit until the process crashes due to running out of memory.
Applications are therefore likely to be vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack if they call parsePatch with a user-provided patch as input. A large payload is not needed to trigger the vulnerability, so size limits on user input do not provide any protection. Furthermore, some applications may be vulnerable even when calling parsePatch on a patch generated by the application itself if the user is nonetheless able to control the filename headers (e.g. by directly providing the filenames of the files to be diffed).
The applyPatch method is similarly affected if (and only if) called with a string representation of a patch as an argument, since under the hood it parses that string using parsePatch. Other methods of the library are unaffected.
Finally, a second and lesser bug - a ReDOS - also exhibits when those same line break characters are present in a patch’s patch header (also known as its “leading garbage”). A maliciously-crafted patch header of length n can take parsePatch O(n³) time to parse.
Patches
All vulnerabilities described are fixed in v8.0.3.
Workarounds
If using a version of jsdiff earlier than v8.0.3, do not attempt to parse patches that contain any of these characters: \r, \u2028, or \u2029.
References
PR that fixed the bug: https://github.com/kpdecker/jsdiff/pull/649
Impact
Attempting to parse a patch whose filename headers contain the line break characters \r, \u2028, or \u2029 can cause the parsePatch method to enter an infinite loop. It then consumes memory without limit until the process crashes due to running out of memory.
Applications are therefore likely to be vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack if they call parsePatch with a user-provided patch as input. A large payload is not needed to trigger the vulnerability, so size limits on user input do not provide any protection. Furthermore, some applications may be vulnerable even when calling parsePatch on a patch generated by the application itself if the user is nonetheless able to control the filename headers (e.g. by directly providing the filenames of the files to be diffed).
The applyPatch method is similarly affected if (and only if) called with a string representation of a patch as an argument, since under the hood it parses that string using parsePatch. Other methods of the library are unaffected.
Finally, a second and lesser bug - a ReDOS - also exhibits when those same line break characters are present in a patch’s patch header (also known as its “leading garbage”). A maliciously-crafted patch header of length n can take parsePatch O(n³) time to parse.
Patches
All vulnerabilities described are fixed in v8.0.3.
Workarounds
If using a version of jsdiff earlier than v8.0.3, do not attempt to parse patches that contain any of these characters: \r, \u2028, or \u2029.
References
PR that fixed the bug: kpdecker/jsdiff#649
References
- GHSA-73rr-hh4g-fpgx
- kpdecker/jsdiff#649
- kpdecker/jsdiff@15a1585