What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-6232: Regular-expression DoS when parsing TarFile headers

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2024-09-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-1333

Description

There is a MEDIUM severity vulnerability affecting CPython. Regular expressions that allowed excessive backtracking during tarfile.TarFile header parsing are vulnerable to ReDoS via specifically-crafted tar archives.

Affected products

• Python: before 3.8.20; from 3.9.0 before 3.9.20; from 3.10.0 before 3.10.15; from 3.11.0 before 3.11.10; from 3.12.0 before 3.12.6; 3.13.0-alpha0, 3.13.0-alpha1, 3.13.0-alpha2, 3.13.0-alpha3, 3.13.0-alpha4, 3.13.0-alpha5 (+6) — fixed in 3.10.15, 3.11.10, 3.12.6, 3.8.20, 3.9.20

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Python 3.10.15, 3.11.10, 3.12.6, 3.8.20. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/34ddb64d088dd7ccc321f6103d23153256caa5d4
• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/4eaf4891c12589e3c7bdad5f5b076e4c8392dd06
• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/743acbe872485dc18df4d8ab2dc7895187f062c4
• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/7d1f50cd92ff7e10a1c15a8f591dde8a6843a64d
• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/b4225ca91547aa97ed3aca391614afbb255bc877
• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/d449caf8a179e3b954268b3a88eb9170be3c8fbf
• https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/ed3a49ea734ada357ff4442996fd4ae71d253373
• https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/121285
• https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/121286
• https://mail.python.org/archives/list/security-announce@python.org/thread/JRYFTPRHZRTLMZLWQEUHZSJXNHM4ACTY/
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/09/03/5
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/12/msg00000.html

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