CVE-2022-32149 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-772 vulnerability in golang.org/x/text. A fix is available for golang.org/x/text — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Denial of service via crafted Accept-Language header in golang.org/x/text/language
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2022-32149.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-32149 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,567 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
golang.org/x/textReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
The BCP 47 tag parser has quadratic time complexity due to inherent aspects of its design. Since the parser is, by design, exposed to untrusted user input, this can be leveraged to force a program to consume significant time parsing Accept-Language headers. The parser cannot be easily rewritten to fix this behavior for various reasons. Instead the solution implemented in this CL is to limit the total complexity of tags passed into ParseAcceptLanguage by limiting the number of dashes in the string to 1000. This should be more than enough for the majority of real world use cases, where the number of tags being sent is likely to be in the single digits.
Specific Go Packages Affected
golang.org/x/text/language
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | golang.org/x/text | all versions | 0.3.8go get golang.org/x/text@v0.3.8 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for golang.org/x/text, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update golang.org/x/text to 0.3.8 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2022-32149 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2022-32149 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2022-32149. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
After careful analysis of the vulnerability Redhat is choosing to keep the vulnerability severity as moderate,the vulnerability exists in the ParseAcceptLanguage function of the golang text/language package,when an attacker could craft an unusually large accept header and due to the parser taking quadratic time…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Logging subsystem for Red Hat OpenShift 5.4 | openshift-logging/elasticsearch-proxy-rhel8:v1.0.0-300 | RHSA-2022:7435 |
| OADP-1.0-RHEL-8 | oadp/oadp-velero-rhel8:1.0.7-5 | RHSA-2023:0692 |
| OpenShift Custom Metrics Autoscaler 2 | custom-metrics-autoscaler-tech-preview/custom-metrics-autoscaler-rhel8:2.8.2-143 | RHSA-2023:1042 |
| OpenShift Developer Tools and Services for OCP 4.9 | ocp-tools-4/service-binding-operator-bundle:v1.3.1-7 | RHSA-2022:7407 |
| OpenShift Logging 5.3 | openshift-logging/elasticsearch-proxy-rhel8:v1.0.0-302 | RHSA-2022:6882 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 Extended Update Support | container-tools:rhel8-8060020240413110723.3b538bd8 | RHSA-2024:1994 |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 Extended Update Support | container-tools:rhel8-8080020240422101606.0f77c1b7 | RHSA-2024:2077 |
| Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Containers 1.7 | rhmtc/openshift-migration-velero-rhel8:v1.7.7-5 | RHSA-2023:0693 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-32149 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2022-32149 across Go dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.