GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-m4p7-r5rc-7g4j pyasn1 BER/CER/DER decoder denial of service via unbounded long-form tag IDs

HIGH Published 2026-07-21 Modified 2026-07-31 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