GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI
GHSA-m4p7-r5rc-7g4j pyasn1 BER/CER/DER decoder denial of service via unbounded long-form tag IDs
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-59884
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Packages
- pyasn1
- 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-400
- Reviewed
- 2026-07-21
Affected packages
• PyPI pyasn1: < 0.6.4 → fixed in 0.6.4
Description
Impact
The BER decoder (shared by the CER and DER codecs) parses long-form tags by accumulating continuation octets in a loop with no upper bound on the size of the tag ID. A crafted input can force the decoder to build an arbitrarily large integer, with CPU cost growing quadratically in input size — a ~1 MB input consumes over a minute of CPU. On Python 3.11+, the oversized tag ID can also trigger an unhandled `ValueError` (integer string conversion limit) while the decoder formats error messages, violating the documented `PyAsn1Error` contract and potentially bypassing caller error handling.
Any application decoding untrusted BER/CER/DER input is affected.
Affected components
• `pyasn1.codec.ber.decoder` — `decode()` and `StreamingDecoder`
• `pyasn1.codec.cer.decoder` and `pyasn1.codec.der.decoder`, which inherit
the same tag parsing
• `pyasn1.type.tag` — `Tag`/`TagSet` reprs could raise `ValueError` when
rendering oversized tag IDs (reachable through decoder error paths)
The encoders and the `pyasn1.codec.native` codec are not affected.
Patches
Fixed in 0.6.4. Long-form tag IDs are now limited to 20 octets (140-bit tag IDs, matching the existing OID arc limit); oversized tags are rejected with `PyAsn1Error`. Tag ID rendering in reprs and error messages was additionally hardened against the interpreter's integer-to-string conversion limit.
Workarounds
Bound the size of untrusted input passed to `decode()` before calling it.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-59884 pyasn1 is a generic ASN.1 library for Python. vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption weakness
References
- https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/security/advisories/GHSA-m4p7-r5rc-7g4j web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-59884 advisory
- https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/commit/628e36ecbb5277a3f01572ce418ef54271b165a5 web
- https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1 package
- https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/releases/tag/v0.6.4 web
- https://github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/pyasn1/PYSEC-2026-3455.yaml web