CAPEC-492 Regular Expression Exponential Blowup

abstraction: standardstatus: active

An adversary may execute an attack on a program that uses a poor Regular Expression(Regex) implementation by choosing input that results in an extreme situation for the Regex. A typical extreme situation operates at exponential time compared to the input size. This is due to most implementations using a Nondeterministic Finite Automaton(NFA) state machine to be built by the Regex algorithm since NFA allows backtracking and thus more complex regular expressions.

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weaknesses (2)

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related attack patterns (1)

Related entries.

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source

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