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GHSA-4qpc-3hr4-r2p4

Symfony's YAML Parser Vulnerable to Exponential Memory Allocation via Recursive Collection-Alias Expansion ("Billion Laughs")

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (reviewed) Low CVE-2026-45304

Packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixed in
Packagist symfony/yaml < 5.4.52 5.4.52
Packagist symfony/symfony < 5.4.52 5.4.52
Packagist symfony/symfony >= 6.0.0, < 6.4.40 6.4.40
Packagist symfony/symfony >= 7.0.0, < 7.4.12 7.4.12
Packagist symfony/symfony >= 8.0.0, < 8.0.12 8.0.12
Packagist symfony/yaml >= 6.0.0, < 6.4.40 6.4.40
Packagist symfony/yaml >= 7.0.0, < 7.4.12 7.4.12
Packagist symfony/yaml >= 8.0.0, < 8.0.12 8.0.12

Details

As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).

### Description `Symfony\Component\Yaml\Parser` resolves YAML aliases (`*anchor`) during parsing. Aliases that reference *collections* (arrays, `stdClass`, `TaggedValue`-wrapped collections) can themselves point to other collections containing aliases, creating exponential expansion at resolution time. A small input can blow up into a multi-gigabyte structure and exhaust memory: the classic "Billion Laughs" denial-of-service against any parser exposed to untrusted YAML. ### Resolution The `Parser` now counts collection alias resolutions in a shared `ParserState` object, with a default limit of **128**, following the [SnakeYAML model](https://github.com/snakeyaml/snakeyaml/blob/master/src/main/java/org/yaml/snakeyaml/LoaderOptions.java). Scalar aliases remain unrestricted since they cannot drive exponential growth. The limit is configurable via a new `$maxAliasesForCollections` argument on `Parser::__construct()`, `Yaml::parse()` and `Yaml::parseFile()`. A new `Yaml::PARSE_EXCEPTION_ON_ALIAS` flag also rejects all aliases outright when parsing fully untrusted input. The patch for this issue is available [here](https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/e77391b2e4f18821198f010d573674c8ed4a970a) for branch 5.4. ### Credits Symfony would like to thank Pietro Tirenna (Shielder) for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for fixing it.

References

External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.