Forge: Regular expression denial of service in PEM decoding (pem.decode)
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 1.4.1
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
- Exploitation: poc
- Automatable: yes
- Technical impact: partial
Summary
Forge (node-forge), a JavaScript implementation of Transport Layer Security, is affected when it parses PEM-formatted input. An unauthenticated attacker who can supply a long, malformed PEM message can make the software use excessive CPU, causing a denial of service.
Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.
Read the original 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.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: poc · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- digitalbazaar forge
fixed in 1.4.1