GHSA-f67q-wr6w-23jq: Boa has an uncaught exception when transitioning the state of `AsyncGenerator` objects

A wrong assumption made when handling ECMAScript’s AsyncGenerator operations can cause an uncaught exception on certain scripts.

Details

Boa’s implementation of AsyncGenerator makes the assumption that the state of an AsyncGenerator object cannot change while resolving a promise created by methods of AsyncGenerator such as %AsyncGeneratorPrototype%.next, %AsyncGeneratorPrototype%.return, or %AsyncGeneratorPrototype%.throw. However, a carefully constructed code could trigger a state transition from a getter method for the promise’s then property, which causes the engine to fail an assertion of this assumption, causing an uncaught exception. This could be used to create a Denial Of Service attack in applications that run arbitrary ECMAScript code provided by an external user.

Patches

Version 0.19.0 is patched to correctly handle this case.

Workarounds

Users unable to upgrade to the patched version would want to use std::panic::catch_unwind to ensure any exceptions caused by the engine don’t impact the availability of the main application.

References

• https://github.com/boa-dev/boa/commit/69ea2f52ed976934bff588d6b566bae01be313f7
• https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/security/advisories/GHSA-g38c-wh3c-5h9r