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OpenAdvisories
High · 7.5 CVE-2026-26209 EUVD-2026-14478GHSA-3c37-wwvx-h642PYSEC-2026-2123

cbor2 has a Denial of Service via Uncontrolled Recursion in cbor2.loads

Published Mar 23, 2026 · Updated Mar 24, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

cbor2 provides encoding and decoding for the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) serialization format. Versions prior to 5.9.0 are vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack caused by uncontrolled recursion when decoding deeply nested CBOR structures. This vulnerability affects both the pure Python implementation and the C extension `_cbor2`. The C extension relies on Python's internal recursion limits `Py_EnterRecursiveCall` rather than a data-driven depth limit, meaning it still raises `RecursionError` and crashes the worker process when the limit is hit. While the library handles moderate nesting levels, it lacks a hard depth limit. An attacker can supply a crafted CBOR payload containing approximately 100,000 nested arrays `0x81`. When `cbor2.loads()` attempts to parse this, it hits the Python interpreter's maximum recursion depth or exhausts the stack, causing the process to crash with a `RecursionError`. Because the library does not enforce its own limits, it allows an external attacker to exhaust the host application's stack resource. In many web application servers (e.g., Gunicorn, Uvicorn) or task queues (Celery), an unhandled `RecursionError` terminates the worker process immediately. By sending a stream of these small (<100KB) malicious packets, an attacker can repeatedly crash worker processes, resulting in a complete Denial of Service for the application. Version 5.9.0 patches the issue.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
agronholm cbor2 < 5.9.0 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 cbor2 5.9.0-1 —
Debian 13 cbor2 No fix yet —
Debian 12 cbor2 No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 cbor2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cbor2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 cbor2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cbor2 No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cbor2 No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
SLES for SAP 16.0 python-cbor2 5.6.5-160000.4.1 SUSE-SU-2026:21139-1
SLES 16.0 python-cbor2 5.6.5-160000.4.1 SUSE-SU-2026:21139-1
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Tumbleweed python-cbor2 5.9.0-1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:10425-1
openSUSE Leap 16.0 python-cbor2 5.6.5-160000.4.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:20468-1

Azure Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Azure Linux 3 python-cbor2 No fix yet —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
PyPI cbor2 < 5.9.0 5.9.0 GHSA-3c37-wwvx-h642

Advisories 3

References