UBUNTU-CVE-2026-123792: High severity ubuntu/symfony vulnerability
The Symfony Yaml components Inline and Parser, parse some YAML documents inefficiently, so that a small crafted document can take disproportionately long to process, keeping a PHP process busy for seconds or minutes, potentially causing a denial of service in Symfony versions prior to 5.4.56, 6.x prior to 6.4.50, 7.x prior to 7.4.23, and 8.x prior to 8.1.11. The parser repeats work it has already done in several places. An embedded mapping in a flow sequence is parsed again for every scalar appended to it, and so are the collections nested in it, so the parse time grows exponentially with the nesting depth. The patterns matching mapping keys and tags scan a run of spaces once per character of the run, and each scalar of a flow collection is matched against a copy of the rest of the collection, so the parse time grows quadratically with the size of the input. Nested blocks are also copied at each nesting level, which consumes memory as well as time. A few other constructs, such as an empty sequence item followed by a blank line or an anchor named 0, trigger similar repeated work. Any code parsing untrusted YAML is affected, with the default flags. In Symfony 7.4 and later, that includes #[MapRequestPayload] when the Yaml component is installed and the endpoint does not restrict acceptFormat. A single unauthenticated request with a YAML content type keeps a PHP worker busy until maxexecutiontime. JSON documents are valid YAML, so a JSON payload sent with a YAML content type is enough for the flow collection case. In Symfony 6.4, #[MapRequestPayload] accepts YAML only when the application registers a yaml request format.
Affected Software
Remediation
Recommended actions to resolve this vulnerability, in priority order.
- Upgrade
Upgrade
Symfony Yaml componentto a version that resolves this vulnerability.Fixed in 5.4.56 - Upgrade
Upgrade
Symfony Yaml componentto a version that resolves this vulnerability.Fixed in 6.4.50 - Upgrade
Upgrade
Symfony Yaml componentto a version that resolves this vulnerability.Fixed in 7.4.23 - Upgrade
Upgrade
Symfony Yaml componentto a version that resolves this vulnerability.Fixed in 8.1.11
Event History
Frequently Asked Questions
Which deployments are exposed to this issue?
Any application that parses untrusted YAML using the affected Symfony Yaml Inline or Parser components is affected under the default flags. This includes Symfony 7.4 and later where the relevant parsing behavior is enabled by default.
What does an attacker need to exploit it?
An attacker needs to cause the application to parse a specially crafted YAML document. No authentication or user interaction is required according to the supplied severity vector.
What is the likely impact of exploitation?
A small crafted YAML input can keep a PHP process busy for seconds or minutes and can consume memory through nested block copying. Repeated requests or parsing jobs could therefore cause denial of service.
Which Symfony versions need remediation?
Affected versions are Symfony releases before 5.4.56, 6.x before 6.4.50, 7.x before 7.4.23, and 8.x before 8.1.11.