GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI
GHSA-vp6j-j7w5-5xjj PyMongo: PYTHON-5986 Host injection in PyMongo connection string parsing via percent-encoded delimiters
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-96748
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Packages
- pymongo
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N
- Weaknesses
- CWE-177
- Reviewed
- 2026-10-05
Affected packages
• PyPI pymongo: >= 3.5.0, < 4.18.2 → fixed in 4.18.2
Description
Summary
PyMongo percent-decoded the entire host section of a connection string before splitting it into individual `host:port` entries. A percent-encoded `,` or `:` in a hostname therefore decoded into a real delimiter, injecting an additional attacker-chosen host and port into the client's seed list.
Impact
An application that interpolates untrusted input into a MongoDB connection string -- for example, a tenant name or hostname fragment taken from a request -- could be made to add an attacker-controlled server to the seed list. Because `%2C` and `%3A` survive most URL-safety checks and only become delimiters inside PyMongo's parser, input that looks like a single hostname to the application becomes two hosts to the driver. The client may then perform topology discovery and authentication against the attacker's host, exposing credentials, or route operations to it.
Unix domain socket paths, the only host identifiers that legitimately require percent-encoding, are not affected.
Patches
Fixed in PyMongo 4.18.2. Percent-decoding was moved into `split_hosts` and now applies only to Unix domain socket paths, identified by an unescaped `.sock` suffix before decoding, and only after splitting on `,`.
Workarounds
Do not interpolate untrusted input into the host portion of a connection string. If unavoidable, reject or percent-decode-and-validate the value before building the URI.
Details
The decoding was introduced in PyMongo 3.5.0 (PYTHON-1282), where `unquote_plus` was applied to the whole host section in `_validate_uri` and, later, `_parse_srv`, before the string was split on `,` and `:`.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-96748 PyMongo's connection string parsing decodes percent-encoded characters in the host portion before the host list is separated on its… vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-177 Improper Handling of URL Encoding (Hex Encoding) weakness
References
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver/security/advisories/GHSA-vp6j-j7w5-5xjj web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-96748 advisory
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver/pull/3066 web
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver/commit/1e7a56db4649b14c4c9a6ac20aa4a8d0d1bb238a web
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver/commit/640dd2383a1a2fb1a10e5222d50ebc0b22a61bd7 web
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver package
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver/blob/4.18.2/doc/changelog.rst web
- https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-python-driver/releases/tag/4.18.2 web
- https://www.mongodb.com/community/forums/t/pymongo-4-18-2-released/343732 web