Denial of service when handling a request with many HTTP headers in ws

Vulnerability Description

ws is an open source WebSocket client and server for Node.js. A request with a number of headers exceeding theserver.maxHeadersCount threshold could be used to crash a ws server. The vulnerability was fixed in ws@8.17.1 (e55e510) and backported to ws@7.5.10 (22c2876), ws@6.2.3 (eeb76d3), and ws@5.2.4 (4abd8f6). In vulnerable versions of ws, the issue can be mitigated in the following ways: 1. Reduce the maximum allowed length of the request headers using the --max-http-header-size=size and/or the maxHeaderSize options so that no more headers than the server.maxHeadersCount limit can be sent. 2. Set server.maxHeadersCount to 0 so that no limit is applied.

References

• https://github.com/websockets/ws/security/advisories/GHSA-3h5v-q93c-6h6q
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/issues/2230
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/pull/2231
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/22c28763234aa75a7e1b76f5c01c181260d7917f
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/4abd8f6de4b0b65ef80b3ff081989479ed93377e
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/e55e5106f10fcbaac37cfa89759e4cc0d073a52c
• https://github.com/websockets/ws/commit/eeb76d313e2a00dd5247ca3597bba7877d064a63
• https://nodejs.org/api/http.html#servermaxheaderscount