GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg
eml_parser vulnerable to DoS via deeply nested parens in Received headers
Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| PyPI | eml_parser | < 3.0.2 | 3.0.2 |
Details
As written in the advisory (Markdown source, shown as plain text).
### Summary
`eml_parser` strips parenthesised CFWS comments from `Received:` headers using a regex-based fix-point loop. The loop has quadratic time complexity in the number of nested parens. A single `Received:` header containing 5,000 nested parens causes ~1.3 seconds of CPU saturation per parsed message; runtime quadruples per doubling of nesting depth.
### Impact
This represents a CPU exhaustion DoS in any pipeline that processes attacker-supplied EML files. An attacker can create relatively small EML files that will take multiple seconds to parse.
This is particularly problematic for synchronous email-processing pipelines (gateways, sandboxes, real-time triage) where worker latency directly translates to queue backpressure and possible service-level outages.
### Patches
Since version 3.0.2, `eml_parser` uses a linear-time algorithm to remove the comments from `Received:` headers.
References
External links from the advisory. They lead to third-party sites.
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/security/advisories/GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/pull/90
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/commit/746a69f86443eb0b6a47f77db3cfe727c21f92b3
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/releases/tag/v3.0.2