CVE-2022-29167 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.4) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in hawk. A fix is available for hawk — see the affected versions and patch details below.
ReDoS vulnerability in header parsing in hawk
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-29167.
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.
hawknpmDescription
Hawk is an HTTP authentication scheme providing mechanisms for making authenticated HTTP requests with partial cryptographic verification of the request and response, covering the HTTP method, request URI, host, and optionally the request payload. Hawk used a regular expression to parse Host HTTP header (Hawk.utils.parseHost()), which was subject to regular expression DoS attack - meaning each added character in the attacker's input increases the computation time exponentially. parseHost() was patched in 9.0.1 to use built-in URL class to parse hostname instead. Hawk.authenticate() accepts options argument. If that contains host and port, those would be used instead of a call to utils.parseHost().
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | hawk | all versions | 9.0.1npm install hawk@9.0.1 |
Affected Products
hawkmozillaDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for hawk, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update hawk to 9.0.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-29167 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-2022-29167 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.