CVE-2018-16848 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in mistral. A fix is available for mistral — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OpenStack Mistral DoS
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
mistralReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
A Denial of Service (DoS) condition is possible in OpenStack Mistral in versions up to and including 7.0.3. Submitting a specially crafted workflow definition YAML file containing nested anchors can lead to resource exhaustion culminating in a denial of service.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | mistral | all versions | 10.0.0pip install --upgrade 'mistral==10.0.0' |
Affected Products
openstack-mistralredhatDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for mistral, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update mistral to 10.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2018-16848 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2018-16848 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.