borewit/music-metadata · Security

music-metadata has an infinite loop vulnerability in ASF parser

GHSA ID
GHSA-v6c2-xwv6-8xf7
CVE ID
CVE-2026-32256
Severity
high
Published
Updated
CVSS
7.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v3
7.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Description

Summary

music-metadata's ASF parser (parseExtensionObject() in lib/asf/AsfParser.ts:112-158) enters an infinite loop when a sub-object inside the ASF Header Extension Object has objectSize = 0.

Root Cause

When objectSize is 0:

  1. remaining = 0 - 24 = -24
  2. tokenizer.ignore(-24) moves the read position backward by 24 bytes
  3. extensionSize -= 0 (loop counter never decreases)
  4. while (extensionSize > 0) never exits
  5. The same 24-byte header is re-read infinitely

This is the same pattern as CVE-2026-31808 (GHSA-5v7r-6r5c-r473) in file-type — strtok3's AbstractTokenizer.ignore() accepts negative values without validation.

Affected Methods

  • parseFile() — HANGS (FileTokenizer inherits vulnerable ignore())
  • parseBuffer() — HANGS (BufferTokenizer inherits vulnerable ignore())
  • parseStream() — NOT affected (ReadStreamTokenizer has own ignore() that throws RangeError)

Impact

A 100-byte crafted .asf file permanently hangs any application using parseFile() or parseBuffer(). music-metadata has 2.2M weekly npm downloads.

Suggested Fix

Validate objectSize >= minimumHeaderSize before calculating the payload. Or fix strtok3's AbstractTokenizer.ignore() to reject negative values.

CWEs

References