Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2019-17514 json

library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as d…

published 2019-10-12 7 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-7866

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
4.7%
EPSS 4.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 91%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as demonstrated by irreproducible cancer-research results. NOTE: the effects of this documentation cross application domains, and thus it is likely that security-relevant code elsewhere is affected. This issue is not a Python implementation bug, and there are no reports that NMR researchers were specifically relying on library/glob.html. In other words, because the older documentation stated "finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell," one might have incorrectly inferred that the sorting that occurs in a Unix shell also occurred for glob.glob. There is a workaround in newer versions of Willoughby nmr-data_compilation-p2.py and nmr-data_compilation-p3.py, which call sort() directly.

Patch / fix

  • python2.7 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 2.7.12-1ubuntu0~16.04.12
  • python2.7 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 2.7.17-1~18.04ubuntu1.1
  • python2.7 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 2.7.18-1~20.04.1
  • python3.5 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 3.5.2-2ubuntu0~16.04.11
  • python3.6 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 3.6.9-1~18.04ubuntu1.1
  • python3.8 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 3.8.0-3~18.04
  • python3.8 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 3.8.2-1ubuntu1.2
  • python2.7 Ubuntu Pro 14.04 LTS 2.7.6-8ubuntu0.6+esm6

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2019-17514

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2019-17514 updated cvss 0.0

python: potentially misleading information about whether sorting in library/glob.html

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 python Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 python, tkinter, python-libs, python-test, python-tools Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 python, python3, tkinter, python-libs, python-test, python-tools, +4 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 pytz, babel, numpy, scipy, Cython, PyYAML, +93 more Red Hat Software Collections python27-python, python27-tkinter, rh-python36-python, rh-python38-python, python27-python-libs, python27-python-test, +11 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

4.67% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 91% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L380 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • github.com https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L405 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.