In pyasn1 0.6.4 and earlier, decoding a constructed OCTET STRING or character string made of many fragments can spend disproportionate CPU time repeatedly copying the accumulated value. A separate indefinite-length ANY path has the same problem while collecting the encoded components. The work grows roughly quadratically with the number of fixed-size fragments, although the input and decoded value grow linearly. An application that lets an attacker supply such ASN.1 input …
In pyasn1 0.6.4 and earlier, decoding a binary-encoded ASN.1 REAL with a large mantissa can consume CPU time quadratic in the mantissa length. The BER, CER, and DER decoders all use the affected RealPayloadDecoder. An application is exposed when it passes attacker-controlled ASN.1 containing a REAL value to one of these decoders, either without an asn1Spec or with a schema that includes REAL. The work occurs inside decode(); the application …
When an application decodes attacker-controlled BER, CER, or DER data without an ASN.1 schema, a container with many distinct long tag IDs can cause quadratic CPU use. Repeated inputs can exhaust CPU and reduce service availability.
In pyasn1 through 0.6.4, decoding a constructed BIT STRING with many fragments repeatedly shifts and copies the entire value accumulated so far. For fixed-size fragments, CPU time grows quadratically with the encoded input size. An application that passes sufficiently large, attacker-controlled ASN.1 data to an affected decoder can suffer CPU exhaustion during decode(); no conversion or formatting of the decoded value is required. The BER and CER decoders reach this …
The univ.Real type converted its (mantissa, base, exponent) value to a Python float using exact big-integer exponentiation. A BER/CER/DER-encoded REAL value only a few bytes long can carry a very large exponent, causing this computation to attempt to materialize an astronomically large integer. Any operation that triggers float conversion on such a decoded value — prettyPrint(), str(), comparison, arithmetic, or an explicit float() call — consumes excessive CPU and memory, …
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 …
The BER decoder (shared by the CER and DER codecs) parses long-form tags by accumulating continuation octets in a loop with no upper bound on the size of the tag ID. A crafted input can force the decoder to build an arbitrarily large integer, with CPU cost growing quadratically in input size — a ~1 MB input consumes over a minute of CPU. On Python 3.11+, the oversized tag ID …
The pyasn1 library is vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack caused by uncontrolled recursion when decoding ASN.1 data with deeply nested structures. An attacker can supply a crafted payload containing nested SEQUENCE (0x30) or SET (0x31) tags with Indefinite Length (0x80) markers. This forces the decoder to recursively call itself until the Python interpreter crashes with a RecursionError or consumes all available memory (OOM), crashing the host application.
After reviewing pyasn1 v0.6.1 a Denial-of-Service issue has been found that leads to memory exhaustion from malformed RELATIVE-OID with excessive continuation octets.