CVE-2026-31808

MEDIUM5.3EPSS 0.03%

file-type affected by infinite loop in ASF parser on malformed input with zero-size sub-header

Published: 3/10/2026Modified: 3/19/2026
Also known as:GHSA-5v7r-6r5c-r473CGA-c296-fw8m-w8p5

Description

### Impact A denial of service vulnerability exists in the ASF (WMV/WMA) file type detection parser. When parsing a crafted input where an ASF sub-header has a `size` field of zero, the parser enters an infinite loop. The `payload` value becomes negative (-24), causing `tokenizer.ignore(payload)` to move the read position backwards, so the same sub-header is read repeatedly forever. Any application that uses `file-type` to detect the type of untrusted/attacker-controlled input is affected. An attacker can stall the Node.js event loop with a 55-byte payload. ### Patches Fixed in version 21.3.1. Users should upgrade to >= 21.3.1. ### Workarounds Validate or limit the size of input buffers before passing them to `file-type`, or run file type detection in a worker thread with a timeout. ### References - Fix commit: 319abf871b50ba2fa221b4a7050059f1ae096f4f ### Reporter [email protected]

Affected packages (1)

CVSS scores

SourceVersionSeverityVector
osvCVSS 3.1MEDIUM5.3CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

References (4)