CVE-2026-125333digitalbazaar forge regular expression denial of service
CVE-2026-125333 is a regular expression denial of service in digitalbazaar forge, rated medium (5.9 on CVSS 3.1).
Why this priority: Medium severity, with no exploitation signal.
Published · Updated · NVD status: Awaiting Analysis
What it is
A crafted string makes a regular expression run for a very long time.
How it is reached
An attacker can exploit it over the network, without an account, and nobody has to click anything. Success also depends on conditions the attacker does not fully control.
What an attacker gains
A successful attack can take it offline. In practice, this kind of flaw lets an attacker exhaust CPU, memory or connections until the service stops answering.
Is it being exploited?
CISA's SSVC assessment notes a public proof of concept.
What to do
- Upgrade digitalbazaar forge to 1.4.3 or later.
- Until it is patched, keep it off the internet or behind a VPN, allowlist or authenticating proxy.
Description from NVD
Forge (also called node-forge) is a native implementation of Transport Layer Security in JavaScript. From 0.1.2 until 1.4.3, forge.http uses _trimString() in lib/http.js to remove trailing whitespace from response header values and cookie names and values with a regular expression that can take quadratic time. A malicious server or on-path attacker can supply a long whitespace run followed by a non-whitespace character in a response header, causing response.readHeader() or response.getCookies() to repeatedly scan the input and block the Node.js event loop or browser tab for minutes. Applications are affected only when they use forge.http with a socket pool to communicate with an untrusted server; forge.http is not loaded by require('node-forge'), and the issue has no confidentiality or integrity impact. This issue is fixed in version 1.4.3.
What this means for your architecture.
A CVE names a product. Whether it matters depends on where that product sits in your systems: what reaches it, which trust boundary it guards and what it can reach once compromised. Veriom maps your components, their relationships and your trust boundaries from your code, cloud and delivery evidence, so you can see where a component like this sits. The radar itself does not look at your systems.
Components it touches
- Public entry points and shared services that must stay up. The flaw sits between untrusted traffic and shared capacity.
Trust boundaries in play
- Internet-facing entry points. No account is needed. Any instance reachable from outside your perimeter, through a load balancer, gateway, VPN or exposed admin port, is in scope.
- Between untrusted traffic and shared capacity. An attacker who crosses it can exhaust CPU, memory or connections until the service stops answering.
Questions to answer about your own systems
- Where does digitalbazaar forge run in your systems, and at which version?
- Which of those instances can be reached from the internet or partner networks?
- What can it reach once compromised: which data stores, secrets and services?
Sources
- CVE records and CVSS scores from the NVD CVE API. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.
- Exploitation status from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
- Exploit likelihood from FIRST’s Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), refreshed daily.
- Explanations are written by Veriom from fixed templates over each record’s data, not by a person reviewing each CVE. Descriptions are quoted from the records as published.