Withdrawn Advisory: Microsoft Knack ReDoS Vulnerability in the Introspection Module

published 2025-08-20 14 mo ago modified 2026-09-10 1 mo ago also GHSA-xh9h-692f-mmg4 , EUVD-2025-25267

cvss: 6.9; version 4.0, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.4%; EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 29%
public exploits: 0; none known

Microsoft Knack 0.12.0 allows Regular expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the knack.introspection module. option_descriptions employs an inefficient regular expression pattern: "\s(:param)\s+(.+?)\s:(.*)" that is susceptible to catastrophic backtracking when processing crafted docstrings containing a large volume of whitespace without a terminating colon. An attacker who can control or inject docstring content into affected applications can trigger excessive CPU consumption. This software is used by Azure CLI.

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical impact: partial
Assessed: 14 mo ago (2025-08-26)

Exploit prediction

0.36% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 29% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	4.0	6.9	CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CNA	4.0	6.9	CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

Affected products

Microsoft Knack

Classification

Weakness

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.

Summary