Unpatched Prototype Pollution Flaw Affects All Versions of Popular Lodash Library

Jul 9, 2019

Lodash, a popular npm library used by more than 4 million
projects on GitHub alone, is affected by a high severity security
vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise the security
of affected services using the library and their respective user
base.

Lodash ^[1] is a JavaScript library
that contains tools to simplify programming with strings, numbers,
arrays, functions, and objects, helping programmers write and
maintain their JavaScript code more efficiently.

Liran Tal, a developer advocate at open-source security platform
Snyk, recently published details and proof-of-concept exploit of a
high-severity prototype pollution security vulnerability that
affects all versions of lodash, including the latest version
4.17.11.

The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-10744,
potentially affects a large number of frontend projects due to the
popularity of lodash that is being downloaded at a rate of more
than 80 million times per month.

Prototype pollution is a vulnerability that enables attackers to
modify a web application’s JavaScript object prototype, which is
like a variable that can be used to store multiple values based on
a predefined structure.

These structures and default values are called prototypes that
prevent an application from hashing when no values are set.

However, if an attacker manages to inject properties into
existing JavaScript language construct prototypes and manipulate
these attributes to overwrite or pollute, it could affect how the
application processes JavaScript objects through the prototype
chain, leading to a denial of service issue or a remote code
execution vulnerability.

According to Tal, the function “defaultsDeep” in the Lodash library
could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of
Object.prototype using a constructor payload, which could result in
crashing the web application or altering its behavior, depending
upon the affected use-case.

It should be noted that exploiting prototype pollution flaws is
not easy and require in-depth knowledge on how each targeted web
application works.

The researcher responsible reported this vulnerability to John
Dalton, maintainer of Lodash, and proposed fixes (pull requests
1 and 2)
that will be included in the next version of the library, expected
to be released very soon.

If your project also uses on lodash, you are recommended to
immediately update your library as soon as the official patch
releases or manually apply the fixes.

^[2]

References

^{^}
Lodash
(lodash.com)
^{^}
CVE-2019-10744
(snyk.io)

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OWASP TOP !0

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Unpatched Prototype Pollution Flaw Affects All Versions of Popular Lodash Library

References

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