GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg
eml_parser vulnerable to DoS via deeply nested parens in Received headers
Quick fix
GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg — eml-parser: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.
pip install --upgrade 'eml-parser>=3.0.2'Details
### 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.
Are you affected?
Enter the version of the package you're using.
Affected packages
References
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/security/advisories/GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg[WEB]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/pull/90[WEB]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/commit/746a69f86443eb0b6a47f77db3cfe727c21f92b3[WEB]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser[PACKAGE]
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/releases/tag/v3.0.2[WEB]