xmldom PI grammar regex ReDoS: quadratic backtracking on unterminated processing instructions
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.3%
exploitation probability
0.3%top 77% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
xmldom is a pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module. From 0.9.0-beta.9 until 0.9.11, the processing-instruction production in lib/grammar.js lets the greedy S+ separator and lazy Char*? data group repeatedly repartition a long whitespace tail when the required closing ?> is absent. Both parsePI and parseProcessingInstruction apply the expression to the entire remaining source, causing quadratic backtracking during DOMParser.parseFromString() under default options and allowing a small unauthenticated XML input to stall the Node.js event loop. This issue is fixed in @xmldom/xmldom version 0.9.11.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N