Expr has Denial of Service via Unbounded Recursion in Builtin Functions

Several builtin functions in Expr, including `flatten`, `min`, `max`, `mean`, and `median`, perform recursive traversal over user-provided data structures without enforcing a maximum recursion depth. If the evaluation environment contains **deeply nested** or **cyclic** data structures, these functions may recurse indefinitely until exceed the Go runtime stack limit. This results in a **stack overflow panic**, causing the host application to crash. While exploitability depends on whether an attacker can influence or inject cyclic or pathologically deep data into the evaluation environment, this behavior represents a denial-of-service (DoS) risk and affects overall library robustness. Instead of returning a recoverable evaluation error, the process may terminate unexpectedly. ### Impact In affected versions, evaluation of expressions that invoke certain builtin functions on untrusted or insufficiently validated data structures can lead to a **process-level crash** due to stack exhaustion. This issue is most relevant in scenarios where: * Expr is used to evaluate expressions against externally supplied or dynamically constructed environments. * Cyclic references (directly or indirectly) can be introduced into arrays, maps, or structs. * There are no application-level safeguards preventing deeply nested input data. In typical use cases with controlled, acyclic data, the issue may not manifest. However, when present, the resulting panic can be used to reliably crash the application, constituting a denial of service. ### Patches The issue has been fixed in the v1.17.7 versions of Expr. The patch introduces a **maximum recursion depth limit** for affected builtin functions. When this limit is exceeded, evaluation aborts gracefully and returns a descriptive error instead of panicking. Additionally, the maximum depth can be customized by users via `builtin.MaxDepth`, allowing applications with legitimate deep structures to raise the limit in a controlled manner. Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the patched release, which includes both the recursion guard and comprehensive test coverage to prevent regressions. ### Workarounds For users who cannot immediately upgrade, the following mitigations are recommended: * Ensure that evaluation environments cannot contain cyclic references. * Validate or sanitize externally supplied data structures before passing them to Expr. * Wrap expression evaluation with panic recovery to prevent a full process crash (as a last-resort defensive measure). These workarounds reduce risk but do not fully eliminate the issue without the patch.

Source published

16 Dec 2025 22:34:16 UTC

Source modified

10 Sep 2026 03:50:58 UTC

Observed here

24 Oct 2026 13:19:41 UTC

Source terms

GitHub Advisory Database · CC-BY-4.0

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CVSS_V3 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Publisher rating · HIGH