Bug 2458038 (CVE-2026-33947)

Summary: CVE-2026-33947 jq: unbounded Recursion in jv_setpath() / jv_getpath() / delpaths_sorted()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: amctagga, aoconnor, bniver, crizzo, dschmidt, erezende, flucifre, gmeno, groman, jlanda, jmitchel, kshier, mbenjamin, mhackett, pbohmill, rhel-process-autobot, simaishi, smcdonal, sostapov, stcannon, teagle, vereddy, watson-tool-maintainers, yguenane
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in jq, a command line JSON processor. Processing a crafted JSON document, specifically when a large array is used as a path argument to the `jv_setpath`, `jv_getpath` and `delpaths_sorted` functions can lead to an uncontrolled recursion and exhausts the call stack, causing an application crash and resulting in a denial of service.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Bug Depends On: 2458401    
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-04-13 22:01:21 UTC 
jq is a command-line JSON processor. In versions 1.8.1 and below, functions jv_setpath(), jv_getpath(), and delpaths_sorted() in jq's src/jv_aux.c use unbounded recursion whose depth is controlled by the length of a caller-supplied path array, with no depth limit enforced. An attacker can supply a JSON document containing a flat array of ~65,000 integers (~200 KB) that, when used as a path argument by a trusted jq filter, exhausts the C call stack and crashes the process with a segmentation fault (SIGSEGV). This bypass works because the existing MAX_PARSING_DEPTH (10,000) limit only protects the JSON parser, not runtime path operations where arrays can be programmatically constructed to arbitrary lengths. The impact is denial of service (unrecoverable crash) affecting any application or service that processes untrusted JSON input through jq's setpath, getpath, or delpaths builtins. This issue has been addressed in commit fb59f1491058d58bdc3e8dd28f1773d1ac690a1f.