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CVE-2026-121691

MEDIUMCVSS 6.7/10EPSS 0.14%

Last modified

CVE-2026-121691 is a medium-severity vulnerability rated 6.7/10 on the CVSS scale. Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (CWE-409) in the ZIP loader of whatstk from 0.7.0 before 0.9.0 allows a party that supplies a chat export to exhaust the memory and the disk of the process that parses it, because _str_from_file() (whatstk/whatsapp/parser.py) calls zip_ref.extractall() with no bound on the size of the members and no check of the compression ratio, then reads the extracted file in full with f.read(). The only guard on the archive counts the extracted files and raises when there is not exactly one, but it runs after extractall() has already written them, so it does not prevent the cost. EPSS estimates a 0.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Description

Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (CWE-409) in the ZIP loader of whatstk from 0.7.0 before 0.9.0 allows a party that supplies a chat export to exhaust the memory and the disk of the process that parses it, because _str_from_file() (whatstk/whatsapp/parser.py) calls zip_ref.extractall() with no bound on the size of the members and no check of the compression ratio, then reads the extracted file in full with f.read(). The only guard on the archive counts the extracted files and raises when there is not exactly one, but it runs after extractall() has already written them, so it does not prevent the cost. _clean_text() then passes the whole text through unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text), which holds a second copy, and the parse builds a list of regular expression matches and a DataFrame over it, so peak memory is a multiple of the decompressed text rather than of the archive. A ZIP is a documented input of WhatsAppChat.from_source() and df_from_whatsapp(), and is the form in which WhatsApp exports a chat on iOS, so the attacker supplies the whole file. This results in a small upload costing hundreds of megabytes of memory and of disk, and in the process being killed where that exceeds what is available.

Metrics

CVSS 4.0
6.7/10

CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

EPSS Probability
0.14%

3.2th percentile

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days. Learn more

Weakness Enumeration

Affected Software

Source: CNA advisory (CVE.org). NVD analysis pending.

VendorProductVersions
lucasrodeswhatstk>= 0.7.0, < 0.9.0

References

Timeline

Published
Last Modified
Status
Deferred

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CVE-2026-121691?
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (CWE-409) in the ZIP loader of whatstk from 0.7.0 before 0.9.0 allows a party that supplies a chat export to exhaust the memory and the disk of the process that parses it, because _str_from_file() (whatstk/whatsapp/parser.py) calls zip_ref.extractall() with no bound on the size of the members and no check of the compression ratio, then reads the extracted file in full with f.read(). The only guard on the archive counts the extracted files and raises when there is not exactly one, but it runs after extractall() has already written them, so it does not prevent the cost. _clean_text() then passes the whole text through unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text), which holds a second copy, and the parse builds a list of regular expression matches and a DataFrame over it, so peak memory is a multiple of the decompressed text rather than of the archive. A ZIP is a documented input of WhatsAppChat.from_source() and df_from_whatsapp(), and is the form in which WhatsApp exports a chat on iOS, so the attacker supplies the whole file. This results in a small upload costing hundreds of megabytes of memory and of disk, and in the process being killed where that exceeds what is available.
How severe is CVE-2026-121691?
CVE-2026-121691 has a CVSS score of 6.7/10 (MEDIUM severity). The EPSS model estimates a 0.14% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days.
How do I fix CVE-2026-121691?
Check the vendor references and advisories linked above for patched versions and mitigation guidance. You can also run a Strix scan to test if your systems are affected.

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Source: NVD / NIST