Resource exhaustion in Zulip

CVE-2021-41115

Zulip is an open source team chat server. In affected versions Zulip allows organization administrators on a server to configure "linkifiers" that automatically create links from messages that users send, detected via arbitrary regular expressions. Malicious organization administrators could subject the server to a denial-of-service via regular expression complexity attacks; most simply, by configuring a quadratic-time regular expression in a linkifier, and sending messages that exploited it. A regular expression attempted to parse the user-provided regexes to verify that they were safe from ReDoS -- this was both insufficient, as well as _itself_ subject to ReDoS if the organization administrator entered a sufficiently complex invalid regex. Affected users should [upgrade to the just-released Zulip 4.7](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/upgrade-or-modify.html#upgrading-to-a-release), or [`main`](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/upgrade-or-modify.html#upgrading-from-a-git-repository).

Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)

EPSS: 0.017 (74.6th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 4.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2021-41115?
CVE-2021-41115 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Zulip, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 4.3/10. Published 2021-10-07.
How severe is CVE-2021-41115?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.3 out of 10.