Hono: Unbounded dot-notation nesting in `parseBody()` can cause memory exhaustionGHSA-g6gw-c38x-mqfc
MEDIUMFix: honojs/hono@531e9c5GHSA-g6gw-c38x-mqfc is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in hono. A fix is available for hono — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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-g6gw-c38x-mqfc.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-g6gw-c38x-mqfc by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 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.
hononpmDescription
Summary
When parseBody() expands dot-separated form field names into nested objects, it does not limit the nesting depth or the total number of objects created. A request body well within a normal size limit can therefore allocate an object graph far larger than the request itself, and concurrent requests can exhaust the heap and terminate the process.
Details
Each dot-separated segment of a field name creates an intermediate object. Neither the segments within a single field name nor the total across a request was bounded, and empty segments were preserved, so a field name could encode one nesting level per byte.
Both shapes produce the effect: a single deeply dotted field name, and a large number of shallowly dotted ones within one body. A request body size limit does not prevent it, because the amplification happens after the body has been accepted.
Dot-notation parsing is not enabled by default.
Impact
An attacker who can reach an endpoint that parses request bodies with dot-notation enabled can send concurrent requests whose memory cost is disproportionate to their size.
This may lead to:
- exhaustion of the JavaScript heap and termination of the server process
- the service remaining unavailable until it is restarted
This issue affects applications that explicitly enable dot-notation parsing. Applications using the default behaviour are not affected.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | hono | all versions | 4.13.5npm install hono@4.13.5 |
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 4.13.5 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-g6gw-c38x-mqfc 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 GHSA-g6gw-c38x-mqfc in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.