GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI
GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg eml_parser vulnerable to DoS via deeply nested parens in Received headers
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-55620
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Packages
- eml_parser
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-1124, CWE-770
- Reviewed
- 2026-08-25
Affected packages
• PyPI eml_parser: < 3.0.2 → fixed in 3.0.2
Description
Summary
`eml_parser` strips parenthesised CFWS comments from `Received:` headers using a regex-based fix-point loop. The loop has quadratic time complexity in the number of nested parens. A single `Received:` header containing 5,000 nested parens causes ~1.3 seconds of CPU saturation per parsed message; runtime quadruples per doubling of nesting depth.
Impact
This represents a CPU exhaustion DoS in any pipeline that processes attacker-supplied EML files. An attacker can create relatively small EML files that will take multiple seconds to parse.
This is particularly problematic for synchronous email-processing pipelines (gateways, sandboxes, real-time triage) where worker latency directly translates to queue backpressure and possible service-level outages.
Patches
Since version 3.0.2, `eml_parser` uses a linear-time algorithm to remove the comments from `Received:` headers.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-55620 eml_parser serves as a python module for parsing eml files and returning various information found in the e-mail as well as computed… vulnerability
References
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/security/advisories/GHSA-g7gc-gmgp-wgqg web
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/pull/90 web
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/commit/746a69f86443eb0b6a47f77db3cfe727c21f92b3 web
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser package
- https://github.com/GOVCERT-LU/eml_parser/releases/tag/v3.0.2 web