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impose a limit on the size of a compiled regex program #67

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BurntSushi opened this issue Apr 1, 2015 · 2 comments · Fixed by #87
Closed

impose a limit on the size of a compiled regex program #67

BurntSushi opened this issue Apr 1, 2015 · 2 comments · Fixed by #87
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@BurntSushi
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From the docs:

Currently, there are no counter-measures in place to prevent a malicious user from writing an expression that may use a lot of resources. One such example is to repeat counted repetitions: ((a{100}){100}){100} will try to repeat the a instruction 100^3 times. Essentially, this means it's very easy for an attacker to exhaust your system's memory if they are allowed to execute arbitrary regular expressions. A possible solution to this is to impose a hard limit on the size of a compiled expression, but it does not yet exist.

The conclusion of this is that regexes specified by a user cannot be blindly trusted, since they can trivially exhausted all memory on your system. We can fix this by imposing some limit on the size of a regex program. (In fact, this probably has to be a limit on the size of a regex AST, which will need to be checked during construction.)

@BurntSushi BurntSushi added the bug label Apr 1, 2015
@huonw
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huonw commented Apr 1, 2015

The limit should be controllable?

@BurntSushi
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👍

BurntSushi added a commit that referenced this issue May 25, 2015
This commit introduces a new `regex-syntax` crate that provides a
regular expression parser and an abstract syntax for regular
expressions. As part of this effort, the parser has been rewritten and
has grown a substantial number of tests.

The `regex` crate itself hasn't changed too much. I opted for the
smallest possible delta to get it working with the new regex AST.
In most cases, this simplified code because it no longer has to deal
with unwieldy flags. (Instead, flag information is baked into the AST.)

Here is a list of public facing non-breaking changes:

* A new `regex-syntax` crate with a parser, regex AST and lots of tests.
  This closes #29 and fixes #84.
* A new flag, `x`, has been added. This allows one to write regexes with
  insignificant whitespace and comments.
* Repetition operators can now be directly applied to zero-width
  matches. e.g., `\b+` was previously not allowed but now works.
  Note that one could always write `(\b)+` previously. This change
  is mostly about lifting an arbitrary restriction.

And a list of breaking changes:

* A new `Regex::with_size_limit` constructor function, that allows one
  to tweak the limit on the size of a compiled regex. This fixes #67.
  The new method isn't a breaking change, but regexes that exceed the
  size limit (set to 10MB by default) will no longer compile. To fix,
  simply call `Regex::with_size_limit` with a bigger limit.
* Capture group names cannot start with a number. This is a breaking
  change because regexes that previously compiled (e.g., `(?P<1a>.)`)
  will now return an error. This fixes #69.
* The `regex::Error` type has been changed to reflect the better error
  reporting in the `regex-syntax` crate, and a new error for limiting
  regexes to a certain size. This is a breaking change. Most folks just
  call `unwrap()` on `Regex::new`, so I expect this to have minimal
  impact.

Closes #29, #67, #69, #79, #84.

[breaking-change]
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