What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-16137: Regular Expression Denial of Service in debug

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-06-07 · updated 2026-10-15
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

The debug module is vulnerable to regular expression denial of service when untrusted user input is passed into the o formatter. It takes around 50k characters to block for 2 seconds making this a low severity issue.

Affected products

• debug-js debug: from 2.0.0 before 2.6.9; from 3.0.0 before 3.1.0 — fixed in 2.6.9, 3.1.0
• Npm Debug: before 2.6.9; from 3.0.0 before 3.1.0; from 3.2.0 before 3.2.7; from 4.0.0 before 4.3.1 — fixed in 2.6.9, 3.1.0, 3.2.7, 4.3.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: debug-js debug 2.6.9, 3.1.0; Npm Debug 2.6.9, 3.1.0, 3.2.7, 4.3.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/visionmedia/debug/issues/501
• https://github.com/visionmedia/debug/pull/504
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r8ba4c628fba7181af58817d452119481adce4ba92e889c643e4c7dd3%40%3Ccommits.netbeans.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rb5ac16fad337d1f3bb7079549f97d8166d0ef3082629417c39f12d63%40%3Cnotifications.netbeans.apache.org%3E
• https://nodesecurity.io/advisories/534
• https://github.com/visionmedia/debug/issues/501
• https://github.com/visionmedia/debug/pull/504
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r8ba4c628fba7181af58817d452119481adce4ba92e889c643e4c7dd3%40%3Ccommits.netbeans.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rb5ac16fad337d1f3bb7079549f97d8166d0ef3082629417c39f12d63%40%3Cnotifications.netbeans.apache.org%3E
• https://nodesecurity.io/advisories/534

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