CVE-2020-7212

The _encode_invalid_chars function in util/url.py in the urllib3 library 1.25.2 through 1.25.7 for Python allows a denial of service (CPU consumption) because of an inefficient algorithm. The percent_encodings array contains all matches of percent encodings. It is not deduplicated. For a URL of length N, the size of percent_encodings may be up to O(N). The next step (normalize existing percent-encoded bytes) also takes up to O(N) for each step, so the total time is O(N^2). If percent_encodings were deduplicated, the time to compute _encode_invalid_chars would be O(kN), where k is at most 484 ((10+6*2)^2).

• CWE-400

• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/blob/master/CHANGES.rstRelease Notes, Third Party Advisory
• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/commit/a74c9cfbaed9f811e7563cfc3dce894928e0221aPatch, Third Party Advisory
• https://pypi.org/project/urllib3/1.25.8/Release Notes, Vendor Advisory
• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/blob/master/CHANGES.rstRelease Notes, Third Party Advisory
• https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/commit/a74c9cfbaed9f811e7563cfc3dce894928e0221aPatch, Third Party Advisory
• https://pypi.org/project/urllib3/1.25.8/Release Notes, Vendor Advisory

Published

Mar 6, 2020

Last Modified

Jun 17, 2026

Status

Modified