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GHSA-8ppf-4f7h-5ppj
No affected components available
Impact
The BER/CER/DER decoders process OBJECT IDENTIFIER and RELATIVE-OID values in quadratic time relative to the number of arcs. A small crafted payload (tens of kilobytes) containing an OID with many arcs consumes seconds of CPU per decode() call, allowing denial of service in any application that decodes untrusted ASN.1 data (certificates, LDAP, SNMP, Kerberos, etc.). The corresponding encoders have the same quadratic behavior, reachable when an application re-encodes previously decoded attacker-supplied values.
The arc-size limit introduced for CVE-2026-23490 bounds the byte length of an individual arc but not the number of arcs, so it does not mitigate this issue.
Affected components
ObjectIdentifierPayloadDecoder and RelativeOIDPayloadDecoder in pyasn1/codec/ber/decoder.py; ObjectIdentifierEncoder and RelativeOIDEncoder in pyasn1/codec/ber/encoder.py. The CER and DER codecs inherit these and are equally affected.
Patches
Fixed in pyasn1 0.6.4: arc accumulation in both decoders and encoders now runs in linear time.
Workarounds
Limit the size of untrusted ASN.1 input before decoding.
The vulnerability can be exploited over the network without needing physical access. It is easy for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The impact is confined to the system where the vulnerability exists. There is a high impact on the availability of the system.
Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.
The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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