CVE-2022-29167: mozilla hawk Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2022-29167 is a high (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in mozilla hawk. EPSS estimates a 1.10% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 65.1% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 05-05-2022
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 23-04-2025
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Hawk is an HTTP authentication scheme providing mechanisms for making authenticated HTTP requests with partial cryptographic verification of the request and response, covering the HTTP method, request URI, host, and optionally the request payload. Hawk used a regular expression to parse `Host` HTTP header (`Hawk.utils.parseHost()`), which was subject to regular expression DoS attack - meaning each added character in the attacker's input increases the computation time exponentially. `parseHost()` was patched in `9.0.1` to use built-in `URL` class to parse hostname instead. `Hawk.authenticate()` accepts `options` argument. If that contains `host` and `port`, those would be used instead of a call to `utils.parseHost()`.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
• CWE-1333Inefficient Regular Expression ComplexityThe product uses a regular expression with a worst-case computational complexity that is inefficient and possibly exponential.