The developers of Node.js, the popular cross-platform runtime environment, this week will release security updates that patch a couple of vulnerabilities, one of which has been rated as having high impact.
The more serious of the two security bugs is a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability affecting Node.js versions 0.12.x through 5.x. A remote attacker can exploit the flaw to cause a DoS condition, according to an advisory published last week.
The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS score of 7.5 and the CVE identifier CVE-2015-8027.
The second vulnerability that will be patched in Node.js has been described as a low-impact V8 out-of-bounds access flaw (CVE-2015-6764). According to Node.js developers, an attacker can exploit the vulnerability to trigger an out-of-bounds access and/or DoS if the targeted application can execute user-supplied JavaScript.
“The severity of this issue is considered medium for Node.js users, but only under circumstances where an attacker may cause user-supplied JavaScript to be executed within a Node.js application,” reads the advisory.
The out-of-bounds access vulnerability does not affect Node.js 0.10.x and 0.12.x.
Updates for Node.js 0.12.x, 4.x and 5.x will be released on Wednesday, December 2 (Tuesday, December 1 for the United States) to address CVE-2015-8027 and CVE-2015-6764. The details of these vulnerabilities will also be made available to allow users to assess their impact.
Node.js is a lightweight platform that is ideal for data-intensive real-time applications. However, the use of a single-threaded event loop makes it less ideal for CPU-intensive applications and highly vulnerable to DoS attacks.
Only a handful of security holes have been found in Node.js this year, but as Checkmarx Head of Product Management Helen Bravo pointed out earlier this year at the Infosecurity Europe conference, Node.js applications are often vulnerable to DoS attacks due to poor coding practices, particularly the lack of input validation.
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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