CVE-2021-41115

Regular expression denial-of-service in Zulip

MEDIUM
6.5
CVSS Score
Published: October 7, 2021 at 10:20 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 04:07 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorZulip

Using zulip by zulip?

Get instant alerts when new vulnerabilities affect zulip - before attackers find them.

Real-time alertsTrack your software stackFree plan available
Severity
MEDIUM6.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 2%

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).

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 4.7
Affected range stops below 4.7, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

CVSS

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
LOW
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-400CWE-1333

Get alerted

Stop reading CVE feeds looking for your own stack

Track the products you run and VulnTracker tells you when a new CVE affects them — with what is known about fixing it, and nothing about the rest.

Free plan, no card