Bug 2565493

Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

Starlet versions from 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via regular expression backtracking when decoding chunked request bodies.

A chunk-size line is matched as a run of hex digits, then .* and a CRLF. A run followed by a bare LF and then a CRLF can never match, and the engine retries the match once for each digit, so the time taken grows with the square of the run length. Nothing limits the length of the run, which can span several reads.

A remote attacker can occupy a worker for about a minute of CPU time with one 128 KiB request, before the application is called.