CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-7212 — Python Urllib3 security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

The _encode_invalid_chars function in util/url.py in the urllib3 library 1.25.2 through 1.25.7 for Python allows a denial of service (CPU consumption) because of an inefficient algorithm. The percent_encodings array contains all matches of percent encodings. It is not deduplicated. For a URL of length N, the size of percent_encodings may be up to O(N). The next step (normalize existing percent-encoded bytes) also takes up to O(N) for each step, so the total time is O(N^2). If percent_encodings were deduplicated, the time to compute _encode_invalid_chars would be O(kN), where k is at most 484 ((10+6*2)^2).

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2020-03-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
python/pypi
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • python / urllib3

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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