Nodemailer: Quadratic backtracking in the addressparser free-text fallback allows remote denial of service

Summary

When addressparser finds no address by its strict reading, it falls back to pulling one out of the free text with /\s*\b[^@\s]+@[^\s]+\b\s*/. That pattern backtracks quadratically: [^@\s]+ is retried from every offset and rescans the run to the next @ each time. A single header value holding a long whitespace-free run with no usable @ blocks the Node.js event loop for tens of seconds.

It is cheaper to exploit than GHSA-prgh-xp8r-p3m5: 273KB is enough for ~43s, where the comment-joined shape needed ~1.5MB for ~10s.

Details

The fallback in src/addressparser/index.ts ran the pattern as a search. [^@\s]+ crosses neither whitespace nor @, so from each start offset it scans forward to the next @ or to the end of the run and then fails, and the engine simply advances one character and repeats. Three shapes make every offset fail:

• the run holds no @ at all
• the only @ has nothing after it
• the only @ has nothing before it

A fourth reaches it with a valid address present but placed past a long run, so the long run is walked before the match is found.

PoC

const addressparser = require('nodemailer/lib/addressparser');
const s = Date.now();
addressparser(' >' + '>[x][x]'.repeat(40000)); // 273KB
console.log(Date.now() - s, 'ms'); // ~43000 ms, blocking

Measured on 10.0.5:

Value	Parse time
'[x]'.repeat(40000) (117KB)	9.0 s
'[x]'.repeat(40000) + '@' (117KB)	8.9 s
'@' + '[x]'.repeat(40000) (117KB)	8.8 s
' >' + '>[x][x]'.repeat(40000) (273KB)	42.9 s

Impact

Algorithmic-complexity denial of service. Node is single threaded, so the block stalls the whole process. Reachable without authentication anywhere inbound header values are handed to this parser, mailparser being the notable case, and reachable from application input wherever a user-supplied string is used as a message address, since mime-node parses to, from and cc when composing.

Patch

The search is replaced by a single linear pass that finds the one offset the pattern can match at, which is then applied there with a sticky regex. Match results are unchanged, verified against the previous implementation over 3.4 million random strings comparing both the match offset and the matched text, plus 800k full-parse comparisons.