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March 23, 2023

GHSL-2021-110: ReDoS in validators

GitHub Security Lab

Coordinated Disclosure Timeline

Summary

validators contains a regular expression that is vulnerable to ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service).

Product

validators

Tested Version

0.18.1

Details

ReDoS

ReDoS, or Regular Expression Denial of Service, is a vulnerability affecting inefficient regular expressions which can perform extremely badly when run on a crafted input string.

Vulnerability

The vulnerable regular expression is here

Please follow these steps to reproduce the issue:

import validators

# Doesn't terminate!
print(validators.url("http://0.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00."))

This vulnerability was found by the CodeQL ReDoS query for Python, which was still experimental when it found this bug in 2021, but is now included in the standard suite of queries used by code scanning.

Impact

This issue may lead to a denial of service.

Credit

This issue was discovered by GitHub team members @erik-krogh (Erik Krogh Kristensen) and @yoff (Rasmus Petersen).

Contact

You can contact the GHSL team at securitylab@github.com, please include a reference to GHSL-2021-110 in any communication regarding this issue.