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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.3

CVE-2021-41115 json

Regular expression denial-of-service in Zulip

published 2021-10-07 5 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2021-28248

cvss
4.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.7%
EPSS 1.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 77%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Zulip is an open source team chat server. In affected versions Zulip allows organization administrators on a server to configure "linkifiers" that automatically create links from messages that users send, detected via arbitrary regular expressions. Malicious organization administrators could subject the server to a denial-of-service via regular expression complexity attacks; most simply, by configuring a quadratic-time regular expression in a linkifier, and sending messages that exploited it. A regular expression attempted to parse the user-provided regexes to verify that they were safe from ReDoS -- this was both insufficient, as well as _itself_ subject to ReDoS if the organization administrator entered a sufficiently complex invalid regex. Affected users should [upgrade to the just-released Zulip 4.7](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/upgrade-or-modify.html#upgrading-to-a-release), or [`main`](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/upgrade-or-modify.html#upgrading-from-a-git-repository).

Patch / fix

  • zulip zulip 4.7

Exploit prediction

1.74% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 77% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • securitylab.github.com https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2021-118-zulip-zulip/ referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 4.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P

Affected products

  • zulip zulip

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

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.