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Denial of service while parsing a tar file due to lack of folders depth validation

Moderate
isaacs published GHSA-f5x3-32g6-xq36 Mar 21, 2024

Package

npm node-tar (npm)

Affected versions

<=6.2.0

Patched versions

>=6.2.1

Description

Description:

During some analysis today on npm's node-tar package I came across the folder creation process, Basicly if you provide node-tar with a path like this ./a/b/c/foo.txt it would create every folder and sub-folder here a, b and c until it reaches the last folder to create foo.txt, In-this case I noticed that there's no validation at all on the amount of folders being created, that said we're actually able to CPU and memory consume the system running node-tar and even crash the nodejs client within few seconds of running it using a path with too many sub-folders inside

Steps To Reproduce:

You can reproduce this issue by downloading the tar file I provided in the resources and using node-tar to extract it, you should get the same behavior as the video

Proof Of Concept:

Here's a video show-casing the exploit:

Impact

Denial of service by crashing the nodejs client when attempting to parse a tar archive, make it run out of heap memory and consuming server CPU and memory resources

Report resources

payload.txt
archeive.tar.gz

Note

This report was originally reported to GitHub bug bounty program, they asked me to report it to you a month ago

Severity

Moderate

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVE ID

CVE-2024-28863

Weaknesses

Credits