CVE-2017-15010 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in tough-cookie. A fix is available for tough-cookie — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Regular Expression Denial of Service in tough-cookie
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2017-15010 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
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.
tough-cookienpmDescription
Affected versions of tough-cookie are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service.
The amplification on this vulnerability is relatively low - it takes around 2 seconds for the engine to execute on a malicious input which is 50,000 characters in length.
If node was compiled using the -DHTTP_MAX_HEADER_SIZE however, the impact of the vulnerability can be significant, as the primary limitation for the vulnerability is the default max HTTP header length in node.
Recommendation
Update to version 2.3.3 or later.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | tough-cookie | all versions | 2.3.3npm install tough-cookie@2.3.3 |
Affected Products
tough-cookiesalesforceDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for tough-cookie, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update tough-cookie to 2.3.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2017-15010 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.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
Red Hat Quay include nodejs-tough-cookie as a build time dependency of protractor. It's no included in the runtime code, and is therefore not affected by this vulnerability.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Mobile Application Platform 4.6 | fh-system-dump-tool-0:1.0.0-5.el7 | RHSA-2018:1263 |
| Red Hat Mobile Application Platform 4.6 | rhmap46/fh-aaa:1.1.3-4 | RHSA-2018:1264 |
| Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | rh-nodejs4-nodejs-tough-cookie-0:2.3.3-2.el6 | RHSA-2017:2912 |
| Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | rh-nodejs6-nodejs-tough-cookie-0:2.3.3-1.el6 | RHSA-2017:2913 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2017-15010 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.