smol-toml: Denial of Service via TOML documents containing thousands of consecutive commented lines
Key facts
- Attack vector
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- Privileges required
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- User interaction
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- Attack complexity
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- Impact type
- Denial of service
- Confidentiality · integrity · availability
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- Fix status
- Fixed
No CVSS vector from any source. Fix status from GitHub. Impact type from CWE-674.
Summary
### Summary An attacker can send a maliciously crafted TOML to cause the parser to crash, because of a stack overflow caused by thousands of consecutive commented lines. The library uses recursion internally while parsing to skip over commented lines, which can be exploited to crash an application that is processing arbitrary TOML documents. ### Proof of concept ```js require("smol-toml").parse('# comment\n'.repeat(8000) + 'key = "value"') ``` ### Impact Applications which parse arbitrary TOML documents may suffer availability issues if they receive malicious input. If uncaught, the crash may cause the application itself to crash. The impact is deemed minor, as the function is already likely to throw errors on invalid input. Downstream users are supposed to properly handle errors in such situations. Due to the design of most JavaScript runtimes, the uncontrolled recursion does not lead to excessive memory usage and the execution is quickly aborted. As a reminder, it is **strongly** advised when working with untrusted user input to expect errors to occur and to appropriately catch them. ### Patches Version 1.6.1 uses a different approach for parsing comments, which no longer involves recursion. ### Workarounds Wrap all invocations of `parse` and `stringify` in a try/catch block when dealing with untrusted user input.
Why it matters now
SSVC decision points
Not available: CISA has not published SSVC decision points for this record.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected versions | Fixed in | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | smol-toml (npm) | before 1.6.1 | 1.6.1 | Patch available | GHSA-v3rj-xjv7-4jmq |
- smol-toml (npm) Vendor— Affected before 1.6.1 Fixed in 1.6.1 Patch available GHSA-v3rj-xjv7-4jmq
Remediation
- Fix · GHSA-v3rj-xjv7-4jmq smol-toml (npm) Fixed in 1.6.1 Advisory →
Timeline
- 2026-10-03 Threatist record created from GHSA-v3rj-xjv7-4jmq
References
Sources
This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD. Sources and licences