CVE-2022-31129 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in moment. 2 public exploit references exist, so weaponization risk is real. A fix is available for moment — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in moment
Exploitation Status
Proof-of-concept exploit code exists
- CISA’s SSVC triage found public proof-of-concept exploit code for this CVE, though no confirmed active exploitation.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-31129.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-31129 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,636 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
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
Impact
- using string-to-date parsing in moment (more specifically rfc2822 parsing, which is tried by default) has quadratic (N^2) complexity on specific inputs
- noticeable slowdown is observed with inputs above 10k characters
- users who pass user-provided strings without sanity length checks to moment constructor are vulnerable to (Re)DoS attacks
Patches
The problem is patched in 2.29.4, the patch can be applied to all affected versions with minimal tweaking.
Workarounds
In general, given the proliferation of ReDoS attacks, it makes sense to limit the length of the user input to something sane, like 200 characters or less. I haven't seen legitimate cases of date-time strings longer than that, so all moment users who do pass a user-originating string to constructor are encouraged to apply such a rudimentary filter, that would help with this but also most future ReDoS vulnerabilities.
References
There is an excellent writeup of the issue here: https://github.com/moment/moment/pull/6015#issuecomment-1152961973=
Details
The issue is rooted in the code that removes legacy comments (stuff inside parenthesis) from strings during rfc2822 parsing. moment("(".repeat(500000)) will take a few minutes to process, which is unacceptable.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | moment | ≥ 2.18.0&&< 2.29.4 | 2.29.4npm install moment@2.29.4 |
| .NETNuGet | Moment.js | ≥ 2.18.0&&< 2.29.4 | 2.29.4dotnet add package Moment.js --version 2.29.4 |
Research 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 2.29.4 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-31129 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2022-31129 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2022-31129. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
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 Fuse provides the affected software but does not use the functionality and as such its impact has been downgraded to Low. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (RHACM) ships a vulnerable version of the moment library. However, this affected functionality is restricted behind OAuth, reducing the…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 | openshift-service-mesh/kiali-rhel8:1.24.16-1 | RHSA-2022:5913 |
| OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 | servicemesh-prometheus-0:2.14.0-18.el8.1 | RHSA-2022:6272 |
| OpenShift Service Mesh 2.1 | openshift-service-mesh/kiali-rhel8:1.36.12-1 | RHSA-2022:5914 |
| OpenShift Service Mesh 2.1 | servicemesh-prometheus-0:2.23.0-9.el8 | RHSA-2022:6277 |
| Red Hat Fuse 7.11.1 | moment | RHSA-2022:8652 |
| Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.5 for RHEL 7 | grafana-0:5.2.4-6.el7rhgs | RHSA-2023:1486 |
| Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.11 on RHEL8 | odf4/mcg-core-rhel8:v4.11.0-30 | RHSA-2022:6156 |
| Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.2 for RHEL 8 | openshift-service-mesh/kiali-rhel8:1.48.2-1 | RHSA-2022:5915 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-31129 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2022-31129 across npm, NuGet dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.