Re:Npm Audit: broken by design?
by IsaacSchlueter on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @09:37PM
(#27828523)
True story, the npm registry was once taken down (not maliciously, just by accident) by a ReDOS in node-semver. That was extra fun to debug because the failure happened inside of CouchDB.
Accepting regexes from user input is a really insidious class of bug that can go undetected for years. I've seen real outages caused by it, so it's absolutely worth doing something proactive about.