Automated Exploit Generation for Node.js Packages

The Node.js ecosystem, with its growing popularity and increasing exposure to security vulnerabilities, has a pressing need for more effective security analysis tools. To reduce false positives, recent works on detecting vulnerabilities in Node.js packages have developed synthesis algorithms to generate proof-of-concept exploits. However, these tools focus mainly on vulnerabilities that can be triggered by a single direct call to an exported function of the analyzed package, failing to generate exploits that require more complex interactions. In this paper, we present Explode.js , the first tool capable of synthesizing exploits that include complex call sequences to trigger vulnerabilities in Node.js packages. By combining static analysis and symbolic execution, Explode.js generates functional exploits that confirm the existence of command, code injection, prototype pollution, and path traversal vulnerabilities, effectively eliminating false positives. The results of evaluating Explode.js on two state-of-the-art datasets of Node.js packages with confirmed vulnerabilities show that it generates significantly more exploits than its main competitor tools. Furthermore, when applied to real-world Node.js packages, Explode.js uncovered 44 zero-day vulnerabilities, with 4 new CVEs.