CVE-2017-15897

Severity: low (CVSS 3.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2017-12-11 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-665

Description

Node.js had a bug in versions 8.X and 9.X which caused buffers to not be initialized when the encoding for the fill value did not match the encoding specified. For example, 'Buffer.alloc(0x100, "This is not correctly encoded", "hex");' The buffer implementation was updated such that the buffer will be initialized to all zeros in these cases.

Affected products

Node.js: from 8.0.0 through 8.8.1; from 8.9.0 before 8.9.3; from 9.0.0 before 9.2.1 — fixed in 8.9.3, 9.2.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Node.js 8.9.3, 9.2.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/december-2017-security-releases/
https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/december-2017-security-releases/

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