Doyensec Vulnerability Advisory

• Regular Expression Denial of Service (REDoS) in cairosvg
• Affected Product: CairoSVG v2.0.0+
• Vendor: https://github.com/Kozea
• Severity: Medium
• Vulnerability Class: Denial of Service
• Author(s): Ben Caller (Doyensec)

Summary

When processing SVG files, the python package CairoSVG uses two regular expressions which are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (REDoS).
If an attacker provides a malicious SVG, it can make cairosvg get stuck processing the file for a very long time.

Technical description

The vulnerable regular expressions are

The section between 'rgb(' and the final ')' contains multiple overlapping groups.

Since all three infinitely repeating groups accept spaces, a long string of spaces causes catastrophic backtracking when it is not followed by a closing parenthesis.

The complexity is cubic, so doubling the length of the malicious string of spaces makes processing take 8 times as long.

Reproduction steps

Create a malicious SVG of the form:

<svg width="1" height="1"><rect fill="rgb(                     ;"/></svg>

with the following code:

'<svg width="1" height="1"><rect fill="rgb(' + (' ' * 3456) + ';"/></svg>'

Note that there is no closing parenthesis before the semi-colon.

Run cairosvg e.g.:

cairosvg cairo-redos.svg -o x.png

and notice that it hangs at 100% CPU. Increasing the number of spaces increases the processing time with cubic complexity.

Remediation

Fix the regexes to avoid overlapping parts. Perhaps remove the [ \n\r\t]* groups from the regex, and use .strip() on the returned capture group.

Disclosure timeline

• 2020-12-30: Vulnerability disclosed via email to CourtBouillon