No Charset in Content-Type Header in express

CVE-2014-6393 → View on GitHub ↗ View on CVE.org ↗ View on NVD ↗

Description

Vulnerable versions of express do not specify a charset field in the content-type header while displaying 400 level response messages. The lack of enforcing user's browser to set correct charset, could be leveraged by an attacker to perform a cross-site scripting attack, using non-standard encodings, like UTF-7.

Recommendation

For express 3.x, update express to version 3.11 or later.
For express 4.x, update express to version 4.5 or later.

Basic information

Type
reviewed
Severity
medium
Advisory on GitHub
Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory
—
Source code
Not specified
Published (advisory)
2018-10-23 17:22:54 UTC
Updated
2023-02-01 05:03:41 UTC
GitHub reviewed
2020-06-16 21:37:54 UTC
NVD published
2017-08-09 18:29:00 UTC

EPSS Score

Score Percentile
0.29% 52.05%

CVSS Scores

Base score Version Severity Vector
6.1 3.0 —
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:L)
Once they can reach the bug, pulling it off is straightforward—no weird race conditions or rare setup.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough.
User interaction (UI:R)
A real person has to do something—click, install, enable—otherwise it doesn’t land.
Scope (S:C)
Breaking this can reach past the original component and bite other resources—bigger blast radius.
Confidentiality (C:L)
Some sensitive info could get out, but not a total data dump.
Integrity (I:L)
Attackers could change some data, but it’s limited—not everything goes.
Availability (A:N)
Service keeps running; no real outage angle.

Identifiers

Type Value
GHSA GHSA-gpvr-g6gh-9mc2 ↗
CVE CVE-2014-6393 ↗

CWEs

CWE id Name
CWE-79 Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Affected packages (2)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem Package Vulnerable range First patched Vulnerable functions
npm express < 3.11.0 3.11.0 —
npm express >= 4.0.0, < 4.5.0 4.5.0 —

References

cvelogic Threat Intelligence