GHSA-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-405 vulnerability in body-parser. A fix is available for body-parser — see the affected versions and patch details below.
body-parser vulnerable to denial of service when url encoding is enabled
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-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7.
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-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7 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.
body-parsernpmDescription
body-parser is Node.js body parsing middleware. body-parser <1.20.3 is vulnerable to denial of service when url encoding is enabled. A malicious actor using a specially crafted payload could flood the server with a large number of requests, resulting in denial of service. This issue is patched in 1.20.3.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | body-parser | all versions | 1.20.3npm install body-parser@1.20.3 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for body-parser, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update body-parser to 1.20.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7 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-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7. 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.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery 1 for RHEL 9 | discovery/discovery-server-rhel9:1.12.0-1 | RHSA-2025:1249 |
| NETWORK-OBSERVABILITY-1.7.0-RHEL-9 | network-observability/network-observability-cli-rhel9:v1.7.0-67 | RHSA-2024:8014 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4.4 | advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-main-rhel8:4.4.6-2 | RHSA-2024:9583 |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4.5 | advanced-cluster-security/rhacs-main-rhel8:4.5.5-3 | RHSA-2024:10186 |
| Red Hat Developer Hub 1.3 on RHEL 9 | rhdh/rhdh-hub-rhel9:1.3-124 | RHBA-2024:9054 |
| Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Containers 1.8 | rhmtc/openshift-migration-ui-rhel8:v1.8.5-7 | RHSA-2024:10906 |
| Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.17 | openshift4/nmstate-console-plugin-rhel9:v4.17.0-202501301204.p0.gcffdc60.assembly.stream.el9 | RHSA-2025:0875 |
| Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18 | openshift4/ingress-node-firewall-rhel9:v4.18.0-202501230001.p0.g1e43b4c.assembly.stream.el9 | RHSA-2024:6121 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-qwcr-r2fm-qrc7 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.