CVE-2026-26209CWE-674

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

High · published March 23, 2026

CVSS v3.0
7.5
EPSS
1%
Percentile
51.6
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.0
7.5 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00675 · 51.6th percentile
Weakness
CWE-674 · Uncontrolled Recursion
Published
2026-03-23T18:53Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 23 MAR 18:53Z
    cbor2 has a Denial of Service via Uncontrolled Recursion in cbor2.loads
    cvelistv5