GHSA-8j4g-w8fx-2239 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-1333 vulnerability in hono. A fix is available for hono — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Hono: ReDoS in CORS middleware via Access-Control-Request-Headers
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-8j4g-w8fx-2239 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 376,715 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.
hononpmDescription
Summary
The built-in CORS middleware (hono/cors) parses the attacker-controlled Access-Control-Request-Headers request header during a preflight (OPTIONS) request using a regular expression whose running time is quadratic in the input length. A single request carrying a long run of whitespace can consume seconds of CPU, and repeated requests can render the service unresponsive. This parsing runs under the default configuration.
Details
On a CORS preflight, when allowHeaders is not configured - the default - the middleware reflects and parses the Access-Control-Request-Headers value. The parser used a whitespace-tolerant regular expression whose backtracking makes the work grow quadratically (O(n²)) with the length of the value when it contains a long whitespace sequence without a delimiter.
Because the header value is bounded only by the deployment's maximum HTTP header size, a single preflight can block request processing for a noticeable amount of time; on runtimes that share one execution thread across requests, this stalls concurrent requests as well. No authentication, special origin, or user interaction is required.
This issue arises for any application using cors() with the default (or an empty) allowHeaders. Applications that set a non-empty allowHeaders do not reach the affected path.
Impact
An unauthenticated attacker can send preflight requests that each consume disproportionate CPU relative to their size, degrading or denying service. This is a denial-of-service issue only; it does not expose or modify data.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | hono | all versions | 4.12.34npm install hono@4.12.34 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for hono, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update hono to 4.12.34 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-8j4g-w8fx-2239 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-8j4g-w8fx-2239 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-8j4g-w8fx-2239. 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-8j4g-w8fx-2239 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-8j4g-w8fx-2239 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.