Symfony's JsonPath Evaluates Attacker-Controlled Regular Expressions in match()/search() Without Limits — ReDoSGHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j
Fix: symfony/symfony@1ac2d47GHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j is a Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in symfony/json-path. A fix is available for symfony/json-path — see the affected versions and patch details below.
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 GHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
Real-World Exposure
symfony/json-path🐘symfony/json-path🐘symfony/symfony🐘symfony/symfonyReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Packagist packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Description
The JsonPath component's match() and search() filter functions compile a caller-supplied pattern straight into preg_match():
'match' => @preg_match(\sprintf('/^%s$/u', $this->transformJsonPathRegex($argList[1])), $value),
'search' => @preg_match("/{$this->transformJsonPathRegex($argList[1])}/u", $value),
transformJsonPathRegex() only performs cosmetic escaping: there is no length cap, no restriction to the RFC 9485 i-regexp subset, and no bound on backtracking. An application that evaluates an attacker-influenced JSONPath expression server-side (e.g. one taken from a query parameter or API field and passed to JsonCrawler) can therefore be made to run a catastrophic-backtracking pattern such as $[?search(@, "(a+)+$")]. Evaluated against a moderately sized document, this pins a CPU core for seconds per request, so a handful of concurrent requests exhausts the worker pool: a denial of service. Because the preg_match() calls are prefixed with @, the PCRE backtrack-limit errors that would otherwise surface are suppressed, leaving no log trace.
Conditions for exploitation
An application that evaluates an attacker-influenced JSONPath expression containing a match() / search() filter against any non-trivial JSON input.
Resolution
JsonCrawler runs the preg_match() calls through a helper that lowers pcre.backtrack_limit to 10000 for the duration of the call (restoring the previous value afterwards), so a pathological pattern fails fast instead of stalling the worker.
The patch for this issue is available here for branch 7.4.
Credits
Symfony would like to thank Himanshu Anand for reporting the issue and Alexandre Daubois for providing the fix.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐘Packagist | symfony/json-path | ≥ 7.3.0&&< 7.4.12 | 7.4.12composer require symfony/json-path:^7.4.12 |
| 🐘Packagist | symfony/json-path | ≥ 8.0.0&&< 8.0.12 | 8.0.12composer require symfony/json-path:^8.0.12 |
| 🐘Packagist | symfony/symfony | ≥ 7.3.0&&< 7.4.12 | 7.4.12composer require symfony/symfony:^7.4.12 |
| 🐘Packagist | symfony/symfony | ≥ 8.0.0&&< 8.0.12 | 8.0.12composer require symfony/symfony:^8.0.12 |
Affected Products
symfonysensiolabsDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for symfony/json-path, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update symfony/json-path to 7.4.12 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j 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 GHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j in your dependencies?
Find it across Packagist, including transitive dependencies.