CVE-2023-32559: A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in the experimental policy mechanism in all active release lines: 16.x, 18.x and, 20.x.

Affected versions

NVD version ranges (for catalog products). Add the product to your stack with a version and matching uses these.

• nodejs node.js16.0.0 and later · up to 16.20.1 inclusive
• nodejs node.js18.0.0 and later · up to 18.17.0 inclusive
• nodejs node.js20.0.0 and later · up to 20.5.0 inclusive

Versions reported by the vendor

Affected version ranges reported by the assigning authority (hackerone). Independent of NVD's CPE analysis and usually ahead of it.

• NodeJS Node

  • 4.0 and later · before 4.*affected · semver
  • 5.0 and later · before 5.*affected · semver
  • 6.0 and later · before 6.*affected · semver
  • 7.0 and later · before 7.*affected · semver
  • 8.0 and later · before 8.*affected · semver
  • 9.0 and later · before 9.*affected · semver
  • 10.0 and later · before 10.*affected · semver
  • 11.0 and later · before 11.*affected · semver
  • 12.0 and later · before 12.*affected · semver
  • 13.0 and later · before 13.*affected · semver

Package-level exposure

OSV and GitHub Advisory data: ecosystem, package and range. SBOM matching uses this table.

Other highest-scoring records for the same primary product.

• CVE-2019-15605HTTP request smuggling in Node.js 10, 12, and 13 causes malicious payload delivery when transfer-encoding is malformed
  56Plan
• CVE-2021-22883Node.js before 10.24.0, 12.21.0, 14.16.0, and 15.10.0 is vulnerable to a denial of service attack when too many connection attempts with an
  53Plan
• CVE-2021-22930Node.js before 16.6.0, 14.17.4, and 12.22.4 is vulnerable to a use after free attack where an attacker might be able to exploit the memory c
  50Plan

Published before and after this one in the same product

• ← EarlierCVE-2023-32006Aug 15, 2023 · The use of `module.constructor.createRequire()` can bypass the policy mechanism and require modules outside of the policy.json definition fo
  35Monitor
• ← EarlierCVE-2023-32002Aug 21, 2023 · The use of `Module._load()` can bypass the policy mechanism and require modules outside of the policy.json definition for a given module.
  39Monitor
• Later →CVE-2023-32005Sep 11, 2023 · A vulnerability has been identified in Node.js version 20, affecting users of the experimental permission model when the --allow-fs-read fla
  21Monitor

Root cause

To simplify setup, a service account is granted broad, cluster-wide permissions. The principle of least privilege is skipped during installation.

A representative example of this vulnerability class. Not the vendor's source code; it shows the faulty pattern and its fix.

1kind: ClusterRole2rules:3  - apiGroups: ["*"]4    resources: ["*"]5    verbs: ["*"]

1kind: Role2metadata:3  namespace: lodos-system4rules:5  - apiGroups: ["apps"]6    resources: ["deployments"]7    verbs: ["get", "list", "update"]

Attack context

MITRE CAPEC attack patterns and ATT&CK techniques for this weakness class (CWE). A starting point for detection rules and threat hunting.