lel

1.0.1 • Public • Published

Potentially dangerous behavior from Promises

I found about about this after I found out about the problem the hard way, but go read the spec, and especially the part about thenables and The Promise Resolution Procedure

“thenable” is an object or function that defines a then method.

(you can test this code on jsbin)

let proxy = new Proxy({}, {
    get (target, method) {
        return (...args) => {
            console.log(`trying to access property ${method}`)
        }
    }
})

proxy.Hi() // Just to show it works as intended
try {
    console.log("Before promise resolve")
    Promise.resolve(proxy)
        .then(v => {
            console.log("In resolved callback", v)
        })
        .catch(e => {
            console.error("In rejected callback", e)
        })
} catch (e) {
    console.error("In catch block", e)
}

The problem

I initially found out about this while experimenting with Proxies and thought the issue was with their implementation, but as you can see in the following code (and this jsbin) it is really in the Promise implementation [edit : spec].

let obj = {
  Hi : () => {
    console.log("Hi")
  },
  then : () => {
    console.log("Trolling hard")
  }
}

obj.Hi() // Just to show it works as intended
try {
    console.log("Before promise resolve")
    Promise.resolve(obj)
        .then(v => {
            console.log("In resolved callback", v)
        })
        .catch(e => {
            console.error("In rejected callback", e)
        })
} catch (e) {
    console.error("In catch block", e)
}

The end of the world

So basically if at any point someone introduces the code from this package

Object.prototype.then = () => {} // Break all the REST apis \o/

in a popular one, all hell will break lose.

The same happens, and this could be very painful, if someone manages to hack a CDN and do this as well.

Debugging

As you can see, I have been overprotective with the bits of code above, on purpose. What it shows is that you have no way to know where the problem comes from.

The reason for that is the Promise will never resolve nor reject.

A thenable's then function is given the resolve|reject callbacks and should act on it like so :

let obj = {
	then : (resolve, reject) => {
		resolve(42)
	}
}

Promise.resolve(obj)
	.then(value => {
		console.log(value) // 42
	})

Otherwise, you now know what happens.

There's no fix for this, and if someone decides to play bad with this stuff, you're in for a hell of a debugging session.

Yay js, I guess...

Warnings

Please be careful when using this package (because obviously, people will do it. Probably for reasons).

But you would know that, if you reached this point. Right?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

p.s. : Obviously I'm publishing this on npm to troll a little. But this is a serious issue, imo

Dependents (0)

Package Sidebar

Install

npm i lel

Weekly Downloads

1

Version

1.0.1

License

MIT

Last publish

Collaborators

  • shahor