Open-Source Security Intelligence

Know every vulnerability
before it knows you.

DevGuard continuously monitors your dependencies and alerts you when CVEs like this one affect your stack — with real-time threat intelligence built for developers.

Search

GHSA-p5w8-wqhj-9hhf

HighCVSS 7.5 / 10
Published Sep 10, 2021·Last modified Mar 13, 2026
Affected Components(0)

No affected components available

Description

Impact

The formatter function that strips comments from a SQL contains a regular expression that is vulnerable to ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service). The regular expression may cause exponential backtracking on strings containing many repetitions of '\r\n' in SQL comments.

Patches

The issues has been fixed in sqlparse 0.4.2.

Workarounds

Only the formatting feature that removes comments from SQL statements is affected by this regular expression. As a workaround don't use the sqlformat.format function with keyword strip_comments=True or the --strip-comments command line flag when using the sqlformat command line tool.

References

This issue was discovered by GitHub team members @erik-krogh and @yoff. It was found using a CodeQL query which identifies inefficient regular expressions. You can see the results of the query on python-sqlparse by following this link.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

Risk Scores
Base Score
7.5

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.

Threat Intelligence
6.9

Exploitation attempts have been detected. Elevated vigilance and prompt remediation are advised.

EPSS
2.30%

The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.

Exploit
Not available

We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.

Browse More

Scan your project

Continuously monitor your dependencies and get alerted when vulnerabilities like this one affect your stack.

Checkout DevGuard