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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2017-16098 json

Regular Expression Denial of Service in charset

published 8y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-9cp3-fh5x-xfcj , EUVD-2018-0386

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.6%
EPSS 1.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 76%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

charset 1.0.0 and below are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service. Input of around 50k characters is required for a slow down of around 2 seconds. Unless node was compiled using the -DHTTP_MAX_HEADER_SIZE= option the default header max length is 80kb, so the impact of the ReDoS is relatively low.

Patch / fix

  • npm charset 1.0.1
  • charset_project charset 1.0.1

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Exploit prediction

1.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 76% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/node-modules/charset/issues/10 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
GitHub 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm charset
<1.0.1
1.0.1

Affected products

  • HackerOne charset node module

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.