CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2022-29167 — Mozilla Hawk security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

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()`.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2022-05-05
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-1333

Affected products

  • mozilla / hawk

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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