Forge: Regular expression denial of service in PEM decoding (pem.decode)

[ Why it matters ]Priority signals

• Public proof-of-concept exploit exists (CISA SSVC)

[ Description ]Official description

Forge (also called node-forge) is a native implementation of Transport Layer Security in JavaScript. Prior to 1.4.1, the affected implementation used pem.decode(), lib/pem.js, missing END line to process the relevant input or security decision. node-forge used polynomial-time regular expressions in pem.decode(), including when searching for a matching END line and parsing encapsulated headers. An unauthenticated attacker able to supply PEM input to any high-level parser could consume excessive CPU with a long malformed message and cause denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 1.4.1.

[ Fixes ]Fixes and patches

• node-forge 1.4.1Fixed version · GitHub Advisories · npm package node-forge: upgrade to 1.4.1 or later (affected <= 1.4.0)

[ Packages ]Affected open-source packages

• node-forge npmAffected <= 1.4.0 · fixed in 1.4.1 · GHSA-7wch-p9px-956x

[ References ]References

• github.com/digitalbazaar/forge/commit/412345db583cd28a9d23636d0d93e9f751b935f3
• github.com/digitalbazaar/forge/releases/tag/v1.4.1
• github.com/digitalbazaar/forge/security/advisories/GHSA-7wch-p9px-956x