CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2019-11390 — An issue was discovered in OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS) through 3.1.0
An issue was discovered in OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS) through 3.1.0. /rules/REQUEST-933-APPLICATION-ATTACK-PHP.conf allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (ReDOS) by entering a specially crafted string with set_error_handler# at the beginning and nested repetition operators. NOTE: the software maintainer disputes that this is a vulnerability because the issue cannot be exploited via ModSecurity
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.3 (3.1)
- Published
- 2019-04-21
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- modsecurity / owasp_modsecurity_core_rule_set
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
The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.