Exploited: 178
LatestCVE-2026-115732 — Certificate Name Authorization Bypass
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AREN
7.5
CVE-2026-119187Fix available

Forge: Denial of service in TLS record processing via call stack exhaustion

node-forge2 min readRead in
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Summary

### Summary Connections created with `forge.tls.createConnection()` processed received TLS records recursively, one stack level per record. A peer can send one chunk of thousands of small records, such as heartbeat records, which are accepted before the handshake, and `process()` throws `RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded`, which terminates Node.js processes that use the documented socket wiring. Fixed in node-forge 1.4.1. ### Details In `lib/tls.js`, `c.process()` reads one record and passes it to `_update()`, which calls the handler for the record type from `ctTable`. Every handler (`tls.handleHeartbeat`, `tls.handleApplicationData`, `tls.handleHandshake` for fragmented messages, `tls.handleHelloRequest` and the other handshake handlers) ends by calling `c.process()` again to continue with the next buffered record, or the next message in the same record. Each record therefore adds `process` → `_update` → handler to the call stack. In Node.js 24, about 2,300 eight-byte records (under 20 KB) in one chunk are enough for `process()` to throw `RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded`. `ctTable` maps heartbeat records to `tls.handleHeartbeat` in every client and server state, so heartbeat records are processed before the handshake without any extension negotiation. The attack needs no authentication and no valid handshake messages. Both server connections (attacked by a client) and client connections (attacked by the server they connect to) are affected. Other record types recurse the same way: a handshake message fragmented over many records, many HelloRequest messages in one record, or many application data records after the handshake. node-forge reports TLS protocol errors through the `error` callback, so applications do not normally wrap `process()` in `try`/`catch`. When `process()` is called from a Node.js socket `data` handler, as in the documented usage, the exception is uncaught and terminates the process. If the exception is caught, the connect…

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