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nopp

NoPP (No Prototype Pollution) – tiny helper to protect against Prototype Pollution vulnerabilities in your application, regardless if they introduced in your own code or by 3rd-party code.

How this package works?

By calling Object.freeze for some built-in JavaScript objects.

The Object.freeze() method freezes an object. A frozen object can no longer be changed; freezing an object prevents new properties from being added to it, existing properties from being removed, prevents changing the enumerability, configurability, or writability of existing properties, and prevents the values of existing properties from being changed.

We believe that there are legitimate cases of prototype changes, but they should happen only during the initialization step. Hence, we recommend including this package as the last one in your application code.

Why should you use this package?

Prototype Pollution vulnerabilities are about 25% of all discovered vulnerabilities in the JS ecosystem and probably the most popular ones.

While ~25% of them are not fixable by upgrading to a newer version, this package will protect you even in case you're using a package that contains a Prototype Pollution vulnerability.

What type of applications should use this package?

• CLI applications
• Web applications
• Front-end application

You should not use this package in case

• Your code is a library (used as a dependency for other projects)
• You do modify prototypes of JavaScript built-in objects in run time

How to use

npm install nopp

// ... all your require calls ...
require('nopp');

or if you use mjs syntax

// ... all your import calls ...
import 'nopp';

Example

const _ = require('lodash'); // Version 4.17.4 is vulnerable: https://security.snyk.io/vuln/npm:lodash:20180130

_.merge({}, JSON.parse('{"__proto__":{"foo":"polluted"}}'));
console.log(({}).foo); // polluted

require('nopp');

_.merge({}, JSON.parse('{"__proto__":{"bar":"polluted"}}'));
console.log(({}).bar); // undefined

Edge cases

In some rare cases, attempts to exploit the Prototype Pollution vulnerability can cause TypeError: Cannot redefine property or TypeError: Cannot assign to read only property exception and cause DoS vulnerability. Please make sure you have uncaughtException handler implemented.

FAQ

Should I prefer nopp instead of the --frozen-intrinsics Node.js flag?

--frozen-intrinsics added in Node.js v11.12.0 and currently has experimental stability level.

The main purpose of the flag is exactly the same as of this package – to protect runtime from unintended modifications of prototypes.

We believe there are numerous reasons why you may prefer using nopp:

1. You control when to import the package hence when to freeze prototypes. In many cases application actually modify prototypes a bit to add some tweaks or polyfills. In such cases usage of --frozen-intrinsics will be not possible without significant application code refactoring. Unlike nopp which should be imported after all other packages and in most of the cases cause no backward compatibility issues.
2. nopp is also applicable for client-side applications. You may prefer to use it for consistency between backend Node.js code and client-side application code.

Is the --disable-proto Node.js flag enough to be protected?

No.

--disable-proto added in Node.js v12.17.0. It is able to delete __proto__ property from the runtime completely and prevent some prototype pollution attack payloads.

Unfortunately, unlike nopp, it doesn't protect your application against constructor.prototype type of payloads.