CVE-2023-36632

Description

[Disputed] A vulnerability was found in Python. This issue occurs in the legacy email.utils.parseaddr function in Python that allows attackers to trigger a "RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object" via a crafted argument. This argument is plausibly an untrusted value from an application's input data that was supposed to contain a name and an e-mail address.

Statement

Red Hat Product Security does not treat this as a security bug because the function is already designed to raise various exceptions like AttributeError, LookupError, OSError, TypeError, UnicodeEncodeError, and ValueError when handling unexpected input. While RecursionError is less common, it occurs due to exceeding the recursion limit, which is an expected behavior in Python for handling deep or malformed input. This error doesn't introduce security risks like unauthorized access, code execution, or other security risks.

Therefore, it is a performance or input handling limitation, not a security vulnerability.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score07.5N/A
Attack VectorNetworkNetworkN/A
Attack ComplexityLowLowN/A
Privileges RequiredNoneNoneN/A
User InteractionNoneNoneN/A
ScopeUnchangedUnchangedN/A
ConfidentialityNoneNoneN/A
Integrity ImpactNoneNoneN/A
Availability ImpactNoneHighN/A

Vector

Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:N

NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Availability

Technical Impact: DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU); DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory)

Resources including CPU, memory, and stack memory could be rapidly consumed or exhausted, eventually leading to an exit or crash.

Confidentiality

Technical Impact: Read Application Data

In some cases, an application's interpreter might kill a process or thread that appears to be consuming too much resources, such as with PHP's memory_limit setting. When the interpreter kills the process/thread, it might report an error containing detailed information such as the application's installation path.

Frequently Asked Questions

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