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Fencer Intel
medium 5.6

CVE-2021-23438 json

Prototype Pollution

published 5y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-p92x-r36w-9395 , EUVD-2021-2096

cvss
5.6
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.7%
EPSS 1.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 77%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

This affects the package mpath before 0.8.4. A type confusion vulnerability can lead to a bypass of CVE-2018-16490. In particular, the condition ignoreProperties.indexOf(parts[i]) !== -1 returns -1 if parts[i] is ['__proto__']. This is because the method that has been called if the input is an array is Array.prototype.indexOf() and not String.prototype.indexOf(). They behave differently depending on the type of the input.

Patch / fix

  • npm mpath 0.8.4
  • n/a mpath 0.8.4

Is CVE-2021-23438 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-23438 updated cvss 5.6

mpath: type confusion can lead to a bypass of CVE-2018-16490

  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2 mpath
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.72% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 77% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • snyk.io https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JS-MPATH-1577289 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • snyk.io https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-JAVA-ORGWEBJARSNPM-1579548 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L/E:P/RL:O/RC:C
CNA 3.1 5.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.1 5.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm mpath
<0.8.4
0.8.4

Affected products

  • n/a mpath

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-843 Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type

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.