Description

flatted vulnerable to unbounded recursion DoS in parse() revive phase

Summary

flatted's parse() function uses a recursive revive() phase to resolve circular references in deserialized JSON. When given a crafted payload with deeply nested or self-referential $ indices, the recursion depth is unbounded, causing a stack overflow that crashes the Node.js process.

Impact

Denial of Service (DoS). Any application that passes untrusted input to flatted.parse() can be crashed by an unauthenticated attacker with a single request.

flatted has ~87M weekly npm downloads and is used as the circular-JSON serialization layer in many caching and logging libraries.

Proof of Concept

const flatted = require('flatted');

// Build deeply nested circular reference chain
const depth = 20000;
const arr = new Array(depth + 1);
arr[0] = '{"a":"1"}';
for (let i = 1; i <= depth; i++) {
  arr[i] = `{"a":"${i + 1}"}`;...
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Fix

The maintainer has already merged an iterative (non-recursive) implementation in PR #88, converting the recursive revive() to a stack-based loop.

Affected Versions

All versions prior to the PR #88 fix.

Mitigation

Aliases

References