CVE-2022-29167: ReDoS vulnerability in header parsing in hawk

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-05-05 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

Hawk is an HTTP authentication scheme providing mechanisms for making authenticated HTTP requests with partial cryptographic verification of the request and response, covering the HTTP method, request URI, host, and optionally the request payload. Hawk used a regular expression to parse `Host` HTTP header (`Hawk.utils.parseHost()`), which was subject to regular expression DoS attack - meaning each added character in the attacker's input increases the computation time exponentially. `parseHost()` was patched in `9.0.1` to use built-in `URL` class to parse hostname instead. `Hawk.authenticate()` accepts `options` argument. If that contains `host` and `port`, those would be used instead of a call to `utils.parseHost()`.

Affected products

mozilla hawk: before 9.0.1 — fixed in 9.0.1
Npm Hawk: before 9.0.1 — fixed in 9.0.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: mozilla hawk 9.0.1; Npm Hawk 9.0.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2022-29167 or the next vulnerability affects your stack