Service interruption via catastrophic route matching backtracking
Published Dec 5, 2024 · Updated Jan 24, 2025
Regular expression denial of service in PillarJS path-to-regexp before 0.1.12 allows remote attackers to interrupt services. Route patterns containing two parameters in one segment with a non-period separator produce overlapping lazy captures that backtrack catastrophically on a long nonmatching path. Exploitation requires a consuming application to expose such a route to attacker-controlled path input, and matching can block the single-threaded JavaScript event loop.
Summary
What happened
Regular expression denial of service in PillarJS path-to-regexp before 0.1.12 allows remote attackers to interrupt services. Route patterns containing two parameters in one segment with a non-period separator produce overlapping lazy captures that backtrack catastrophically on a long nonmatching path. Exploitation requires a consuming application to expose such a route to attacker-controlled path input, and matching can block the single-threaded JavaScript event loop.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2024-52798
- Published
- Dec 5, 2024
- Updated
- Jan 24, 2025
- Vendor
- PillarJS
- Product
- path-to-regexp
- Classifications
- CWE-1333, T1499.004
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Dec 5, 2024CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jan 24, 2025Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=0 <0.1.12
- Affected versionversion=< 0.1.12
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
CVSS describes severity. EPSS estimates exploitation probability.
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
- Upstream catastrophic-backtracking demonstrationproof of concept · demonstrated
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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