What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-40898: pypa/wheel vulnerable to Regular Expression denial of service (ReDoS)

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2022-12-23 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

An issue discovered in Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) Wheel 0.37.1 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via attacker controlled input to wheel cli.

Affected products

• pypa wheel: before 0.38.1 — fixed in 0.38.1
• Pypi Wheel: before 0.38.1; 0.1, 0.10.0, 0.10.1, 0.10.2, 0.10.3, 0.11.0 (+58) — fixed in 0.38.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: pypa wheel 0.38.1; Pypi Wheel 0.38.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/pypa/wheel/blob/main/src/wheel/wheelfile.py#L18
• https://pypi.org/project/wheel/
• https://pyup.io/posts/pyup-discovers-redos-vulnerabilities-in-top-python-packages/
• https://github.com/pypa/wheel/blob/main/src/wheel/wheelfile.py#L18
• https://pypi.org/project/wheel/
• https://pyup.io/posts/pyup-discovers-redos-vulnerabilities-in-top-python-packages/

Get alerted when CVE-2022-40898 or the next vulnerability affects your stack