CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2018-18385 — Asciidoctor in versions < 1.5.8 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop)
Asciidoctor in versions < 1.5.8 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop). The loop was caused by the fact that Parser.next_block was not exhausting all the lines in the reader as the while loop expected it would. This was happening because the regular expression that detects any list was not agreeing with the regular expression that detects a specific list type. So the line kept getting pushed back onto the reader, hence causing the loop.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.0)
- Published
- 2018-10-16
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-835
Affected products
- asciidoctor / asciidoctor
Matched remediation archetype
Resource exhaustion and denial of service
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
- Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
- Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.
Remediate safely
- Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
- Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
- Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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