GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq 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.
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption 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 GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq.
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
GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq 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 379,145 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.
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 |
Detection & 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 GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq 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 GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-44pw-h2cw-w3vq across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.