GitHub Advisoryadvisory · Packagist
GHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j Symfony's JsonPath Evaluates Attacker-Controlled Regular Expressions in match()/search() Without Limits — ReDoS
LOW
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-45756
- Ecosystem
- Packagist
- Packages
- symfony/json-path, symfony/symfony
- Severity
- Low
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U
- Weaknesses
- CWE-1333, CWE-400
- Reviewed
- 2026-05-28
Affected packages
• Packagist symfony/json-path: >= 7.3.0, < 7.4.12 → fixed in 7.4.12
• Packagist symfony/json-path: >= 8.0.0, < 8.0.12 → fixed in 8.0.12
• Packagist symfony/symfony: >= 7.3.0, < 7.4.12 → fixed in 7.4.12
• Packagist symfony/symfony: >= 8.0.0, < 8.0.12 → fixed in 8.0.12
Description
Description
The `JsonPath` component's `match()` and `search()` filter functions compile a caller-supplied pattern straight into `preg_match()`:
```php
'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.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-45756 Symfony is a PHP framework for web and console applications and a set of reusable PHP components. vulnerability
References
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony/security/advisories/GHSA-8v8v-g73j-492j web
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/1ac2d47418ec23066112db1e6ca35be6fe123d14 web
- https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/symfony/json-path/CVE-2026-45756.yaml web
- https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/symfony/symfony/CVE-2026-45756.yaml web
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony package
- https://symfony.com/cve-2026-45756 web