CVE-2023-45813

Description

### Summary _The torbot.modules.validators.validate_link function uses the python-validators URL validation regex. This particular regular expression has an exponential complexity which allows an attacker to cause an application crash using a well-crafted argument.._ ### Details https://github.com/DedSecInside/TorBot/blob/d2b89192379ad033ffc7044efff26e16ccc02d5a/torbot/modules/validators.py#L13 An attacker can use a well-crafted URL argument to exploit the vulnerability in the regular expression and cause a Denial of Service on the system. ### PoC I have uploaded a secret gist containing a PoC (https://gist.github.com/ikkebr/6041055314f1cfb8e65b2a1acbaae12c). By adding one special character at the end of the user argument of the URL, the regular expression will take exponentially longer to compute. For a string of size 10k, the regex will take 0.01s without the well-crafted URL and 1.3s with the well-crafted URL exploit. For a string of size 50k, the regex will take 0.03s without the well-crafted URL and 35s with the well-crafted URL exploit. For a string of size 100k, the regex will take 0.05s without the well-crafted URL and over 200s with the well-crafted URL exploit. The regular expression used in the validators library versions [0.20, 0.11] is vulnerable to this attack. Version 0.21 appears to be unaffected, but it no longer contains a single regular expression. ### Impact An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial of service or increased resource usage.

How to fix CVE-2023-45813

To remediate CVE-2023-45813, upgrade the affected package to a fixed version below.

• —upgrade to 4.0.0 or later

Is CVE-2023-45813 being exploited?

Low — EPSS is 0.8%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.

Affected packages (1)

• from 0, < 4.0.0