GHSA-wqch-xfxh-vrr4 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in body-parser. A fix is available for body-parser — see the affected versions and patch details below.
body-parser is vulnerable to denial of service when url encoding is used
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-wqch-xfxh-vrr4.
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-wqch-xfxh-vrr4 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
Impact
body-parser 2.2.0 is vulnerable to denial of service due to inefficient handling of URL-encoded bodies with very large numbers of parameters. An attacker can send payloads containing thousands of parameters within the default 100KB request size limit, causing elevated CPU and memory usage. This can lead to service slowdown or partial outages under sustained malicious traffic.
Patches
This issue is addressed in version 2.2.1.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | body-parser | ≥ 2.2.0&&< 2.2.1 | 2.2.1npm install body-parser@2.2.1 |
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 2.2.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-wqch-xfxh-vrr4 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-wqch-xfxh-vrr4 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-wqch-xfxh-vrr4. 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-wqch-xfxh-vrr4 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-wqch-xfxh-vrr4 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.