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Regular expression injection — CodeQL query help documentation

ID: js/regex-injection
Kind: path-problem
Security severity: 7.5
Severity: error
Precision: high
Tags:
   - security
   - external/cwe/cwe-730
   - external/cwe/cwe-400
Query suites:
   - javascript-code-scanning.qls
   - javascript-security-extended.qls
   - javascript-security-and-quality.qls

Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository

Constructing a regular expression with unsanitized user input is dangerous as a malicious user may be able to modify the meaning of the expression. In particular, such a user may be able to provide a regular expression fragment that takes exponential time in the worst case, and use that to perform a Denial of Service attack.

Recommendation

Before embedding user input into a regular expression, use a sanitization function such as lodash’s _.escapeRegExp to escape meta-characters that have special meaning.

Example

The following example shows a HTTP request parameter that is used to construct a regular expression without sanitizing it first:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.get('/findKey', function(req, res) {
  var key = req.param("key"), input = req.param("input");

  // BAD: Unsanitized user input is used to construct a regular expression
  var re = new RegExp("\\b" + key + "=(.*)\n");
});

Instead, the request parameter should be sanitized first, for example using the function _.escapeRegExp from the lodash package. This ensures that the user cannot insert characters which have a special meaning in regular expressions.

var express = require('express');
var _ = require('lodash');
var app = express();

app.get('/findKey', function(req, res) {
  var key = req.param("key"), input = req.param("input");

  // GOOD: User input is sanitized before constructing the regex
  var safeKey = _.escapeRegExp(key);
  var re = new RegExp("\\b" + safeKey + "=(.*)\n");
});

References