{"id":"CVE-2021-41115","aliases":["EUVD-2021-28248","GHSA-4h36-mqfq-42jg"],"status":"published","title":"Regular expression denial-of-service in Zulip","description":"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).","severity":{"version":"3.1","score":4.3,"vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L","level":"medium","assessor":"cna","from":"cve"},"epss":{"day":"2026-11-12","score":0.01737,"percentile":0.78027,"model":"v2026.06.15"},"facts":{"in_kev":false,"known_exploited":false,"public_exploit":false,"fix_available":false},"cwes":["CWE-1333","CWE-400"],"published":"2021-10-07T22:20:13Z","modified":"2026-10-24T10:50:25Z","products":[{"vendor":"zulip","product":"zulip"}],"references":[{"url":"https://github.com/zulip/zulip/security/advisories/GHSA-4h36-mqfq-42jg","tags":["x_refsource_CONFIRM","x_transferred","Patch","Third Party Advisory","fix"]},{"url":"https://github.com/zulip/zulip/commit/e2d303c1bb5f538d17dc3d9134bc8858bdece781","tags":["x_refsource_MISC","x_transferred","Patch","Third Party Advisory","fix"]},{"url":"https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2021-118-zulip-zulip/","tags":["x_refsource_MISC","x_transferred","Exploit","Third Party Advisory","evidence"]}],"sources":{"cve":[{"id":"CVE-2021-41115","title":"Regular expression denial-of-service in Zulip","description":"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).","status":"published","published":"2021-10-07T22:20:13Z","modified":"2024-08-04T02:59:31.57Z","cvss":[{"version":"3.1","score":4.3,"vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L","level":"medium","assessor":"cna"}],"cwes":["CWE-400","CWE-1333"],"updated_at":"2026-11-02T14:32:59.105382Z"}],"euvd":[{"id":"EUVD-2021-28248","description":"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).","status":"published","published":"2021-10-07T22:20:13Z","modified":"2024-08-04T02:59:31Z","cvss":[{"version":"3.1","score":4.3,"vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L","level":"medium"}],"updated_at":"2026-11-03T03:24:18.784846Z"}],"nvd":[{"id":"CVE-2021-41115","description":"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).","status":"published","published":"2021-10-07T23:15:08.027Z","modified":"2026-06-17T04:07:54.053Z","cvss":[{"version":"3.1","score":4.3,"vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L","level":"medium","assessor":"secondary"},{"version":"3.1","score":6.5,"vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H","level":"medium","assessor":"primary"},{"version":"2.0","score":4,"vector":"AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P","level":"medium","assessor":"primary"}],"cwes":["CWE-400","CWE-1333"],"updated_at":"2026-11-02T14:06:59.689345Z"}],"osv":[{"id":"CVE-2021-41115","description":"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).","status":"published","published":"2021-10-07T23:15:08.027Z","modified":"2026-10-24T10:50:25.643451888Z","cvss":[{"version":"3.1","score":6.5,"vector":"CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H","level":"medium"}],"updated_at":"2026-11-02T15:44:21.249056Z"}]}}