CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-23842 — ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots

High CVSS 7.5

ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots. ChatterBot versions up to 1.2.10 are vulnerable to a denial-of-service condition caused by improper database session and connection pool management. Concurrent invocations of the get_response() method can exhaust the underlying SQLAlchemy connection pool, resulting in persistent service unavailability and requiring a manual restart to recover. Version 1.2.11 fixes the issue.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-01-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • chatterbot / chatterbot

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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