CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-12121 — Nodejs Node.Js security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

Node.js: All versions prior to Node.js 6.15.0, 8.14.0, 10.14.0 and 11.3.0: Denial of Service with large HTTP headers: By using a combination of many requests with maximum sized headers (almost 80 KB per connection), and carefully timed completion of the headers, it is possible to cause the HTTP server to abort from heap allocation failure. Attack potential is mitigated by the use of a load balancer or other proxy layer.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2018-11-28
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
javascript/npm
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • nodejs / node.js
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_eus / 8.1
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_eus / 8.2
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_eus / 8.4

Showing 6 representative product identities from 18 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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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