CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-43367 — Boa is an embeddable and experimental Javascript engine written in Rust

High CVSS 7.5

Boa is an embeddable and experimental Javascript engine written in Rust. Starting in version 0.16 and prior to version 0.19.0, a wrong assumption made when handling ECMAScript's `AsyncGenerator` operations can cause an uncaught exception on certain scripts. Boa's implementation of `AsyncGenerator` makes the assumption that the state of an `AsyncGenerator` object cannot change while resolving a promise created by methods of `AsyncGenerator` such as `%AsyncGeneratorPrototype%.next`, `%AsyncGeneratorPrototype%.return`, or `%AsyncGeneratorPrototype%.throw`. However, a carefully constructed code could trigger a state transition from a getter method for the promise's `then` property, which causes the engine to fail an assertion of this assumption, causing an uncaught exception. This could be used to create a Denial Of Service attack in applications that run arbitrary ECMAScript code provided by an external user. Version 0.19.0 is patched to correctly handle this case. Users unable to upgrade to the patched version would want to use `std::panic::catch_unwind` to ensure any exceptions caused by the engine don't impact the availability of the main application.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-08-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
javascript/npm
Weaknesses
CWE-248

Affected products

No browser-safe affected-product rows are available.

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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