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GHSA-gpv5-7x3g-ghjv json

fast-xml-parser regex vulnerability patch could be improved from a safety perspective

published 3y ago modified 3y ago

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
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no score, EPSS covers CVEs only
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

### Summary This is a comment on https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/fast-xml-parser/security/advisories/GHSA-6w63-h3fj-q4vw and the patches fixing it.

### Details The code which validates a name calls the validator: https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/fast-xml-parser/blob/ecf6016f9b48aec1a921e673158be0773d07283e/src/xmlparser/DocTypeReader.js#L145-L153 This checks for the presence of an invalid character. Such an approach is always risky, as it is so easy to forget to include an invalid character in the list. A safer approach is to validate entity names against the XML specification: https://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#sec-common-syn - an ENTITY name is a Name:

``` [4] NameStartChar ::= ":" | [A-Z] | "_" | [a-z] | [#xC0-#xD6] | [#xD8-#xF6] | [#xF8-#x2FF] | [#x370-#x37D] | [#x37F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF] [4a] NameChar ::= NameStartChar | "-" | "." | [0-9] | #xB7 | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040] [5] Name ::= NameStartChar (NameChar)* ```

so the safest way to validate an entity name is to build a regex to represent this expression and check whether the name given matches the regex. (Something along the lines of `/^[name start char class][name char class]*$/`.) There's probably a nice way to simplify the explicit list rather than typing it out verbatim using Unicode character properties, but I don't know enough to do so.

Patch / fix

  • npm fast-xml-parser 4.2.5

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Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm fast-xml-parser
>=4.2.4, <4.2.5
4.2.5

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.

The maintainers of NaturalIntelligence/fast-xml-parser published their own advisory on GitHub. Reviewed sources take precedence over it.