CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-32763 — OpenProject is open-source, web-based project management software

Medium CVSS 6.5

OpenProject is open-source, web-based project management software. In versions prior to 11.3.3, the `MessagesController` class of OpenProject has a `quote` method that implements the logic behind the Quote button in the discussion forums, and it uses a regex to strip `<pre>` tags from the message being quoted. The `(.|\s)` part can match a space character in two ways, so an unterminated `<pre>` tag containing `n` spaces causes Ruby's regex engine to backtrack to try 2<sup>n</sup> states in the NFA. This will result in a Regular Expression Denial of Service. The issue is fixed in OpenProject 11.3.3. As a workaround, one may install the patch manually.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-07-20
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • openproject / openproject

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.