CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-41167 — modern-async is an open source JavaScript tooling library for asynchronous operations using async/await and promises

High CVSS 7.5

modern-async is an open source JavaScript tooling library for asynchronous operations using async/await and promises. In affected versions a bug affecting two of the functions in this library: forEachSeries and forEachLimit. They should limit the concurrency of some actions but, in practice, they don't. Any code calling these functions will be written thinking they would limit the concurrency but they won't. This could lead to potential security issues in other projects. The problem has been patched in 1.0.4. There is no workaround.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-10-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
javascript/npm
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-770

Affected products

  • modern-async_project / modern-async

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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