qs's arrayLimit bypass in comma parsing allows denial of service

Summary

The arrayLimit option in qs does not enforce limits for comma-separated values when comma: true is enabled, allowing attackers to cause denial-of-service via memory exhaustion. This is a bypass of the array limit enforcement, similar to the bracket notation bypass addressed in GHSA-6rw7-vpxm-498p (CVE-2025-15284).

Details

When the comma option is set to true (not the default, but configurable in applications), qs allows parsing comma-separated strings as arrays (e.g., ?param=a,b,c becomes ['a', 'b', 'c']). However, the limit check for arrayLimit (default: 20) and the optional throwOnLimitExceeded occur after the comma-handling logic in parseArrayValue, enabling a bypass. This permits creation of arbitrarily large arrays from a single parameter, leading to excessive memory allocation.

Vulnerable code (lib/parse.js: lines ~40-50):

if (val && typeof val === 'string' && options.comma && val.indexOf(',') > -1) {
    return val.split(',');
}

if (options.throwOnLimitExceeded && currentArrayLength >= options.arrayLimit) {
    throw new RangeError('Array limit exceeded. Only ' + options.arrayLimit + ' element' + (options.arrayLimit === 1 ? '' : 's') + ' allowed in an array.');
}

return val;

The split(',') returns the array immediately, skipping the subsequent limit check. Downstream merging via utils.combine does not prevent allocation, even if it marks overflows for sparse arrays.This discrepancy allows attackers to send a single…