Medium

Buffer under-read in workerd

  • Disclosed: 12.05.2023
  • Updated: 11.10.2026 10:22

Impact

Prior to version v1.20230419.0, the FormData API implementation was subject to an integer overflow. If a FormData instance contained more than 2^31 elements, the forEach() method could end up reading from the wrong location in memory while iterating over elements. This would most likely lead to a segmentation fault, but could theoretically allow arbitrary undefined behavior.

In order for the bug to be exploitable, the process would need to be able to allocate 160GB of RAM. Due to this, the bug was never exploitable on the Cloudflare Workers platform, but could theoretically be exploitable on deployments of workerd running on machines with a huge amount of memory. Moreover, in order to be remotely exploited, an attacker would have to upload a single form-encoded HTTP request of at least tens of gigabytes in size. The application code would then have to use request.formData() to parse the request and formData.forEach() to iterate over this data. Due to these limitations, the exploitation likelihood was considered Low.

Patches

A fix that addresses this vulnerability has been released in version v1.20230419.0 and users are encouraged to update to the latest version available.

References

Release - https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/releases/tag/v1.20230419.0

Affected software

Click a technology to see all vulnerabilities affecting it.

PlatformPackageVulnerable versionsFixed in
npm package workerd < 1.20230419.0 1.20230419.0

References

CVSS score 6.5/10
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:H
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-125, CWE-127, CWE-190
Platform
npm
Package
workerd
Disclosed
12.05.2023
Updated
11.10.2026 10:22

Sources and licenses

OSV / GitHub Advisory Database - GHSA-8vx6-69vg-c46f - CC BY 4.0

Vulnerability history: workerd

All published vulnerabilities of this package (npm package), newest first. Shows whether this is a one-off slip or a package that needs watching.

This is the only known vulnerability of this package.

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