Uncontrolled Recursion Affecting localstack package, versions <4.14.0-r5


Severity

Recommended
low

Based on default assessment until relevant scores are available.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.42% (34th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-CHAINGUARDLATEST-LOCALSTACK-15891623
  • published4 Apr 2026
  • disclosed23 Mar 2026

Introduced: 23 Mar 2026

CVE-2026-26209  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-674  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Chainguard localstack to version 4.14.0-r5 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream localstack package and not the localstack package as distributed by Chainguard. See How to fix? for Chainguard relevant fixed versions and status.

cbor2 provides encoding and decoding for the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) serialization format. Versions prior to 5.9.0 are vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack caused by uncontrolled recursion when decoding deeply nested CBOR structures. This vulnerability affects both the pure Python implementation and the C extension _cbor2. The C extension relies on Python's internal recursion limits Py_EnterRecursiveCall rather than a data-driven depth limit, meaning it still raises RecursionError and crashes the worker process when the limit is hit. While the library handles moderate nesting levels, it lacks a hard depth limit. An attacker can supply a crafted CBOR payload containing approximately 100,000 nested arrays 0x81. When cbor2.loads() attempts to parse this, it hits the Python interpreter's maximum recursion depth or exhausts the stack, causing the process to crash with a RecursionError. Because the library does not enforce its own limits, it allows an external attacker to exhaust the host application's stack resource. In many web application servers (e.g., Gunicorn, Uvicorn) or task queues (Celery), an unhandled RecursionError terminates the worker process immediately. By sending a stream of these small (<100KB) malicious packets, an attacker can repeatedly crash worker processes, resulting in a complete Denial of Service for the application. Version 5.9.0 patches the issue.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1