CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2017-16118 — The forwarded module is used by the Express.js framework to handle the X-Forwarded-For header
High
CVSS 7.5
The forwarded module is used by the Express.js framework to handle the X-Forwarded-For header. It is vulnerable to a regular expression denial of service when it's passed specially crafted input to parse. This causes the event loop to be blocked causing a denial of service condition.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.0)
- Published
- 2018-06-07
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- forwarded_project / forwarded
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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