CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-15168 — Node-Fetch Project Node-Fetch security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3

node-fetch before versions 2.6.1 and 3.0.0-beta.9 did not honor the size option after following a redirect, which means that when a content size was over the limit, a FetchError would never get thrown and the process would end without failure. For most people, this fix will have a little or no impact. However, if you are relying on node-fetch to gate files above a size, the impact could be significant, for example: If you don't double-check the size of the data after fetch() has completed, your JS thread could get tied up doing work on a large file (DoS) and/or cost you money in computing.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2020-09-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
javascript/npm
Weaknesses
CWE-20, CWE-770

Affected products

  • node-fetch_project / node-fetch
  • node-fetch_project / node-fetch / 3.0.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 6 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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