Vulnerability identifier: #VU35161

Vulnerability risk: Medium

CVSSv3.1: 6.5 [CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N/E:U/RL:O/RC:C]

CVE-ID: CVE-2019-17514

CWE-ID: CWE-20

Exploitation vector: Network

Exploit availability: No

Vulnerable software:
Python
Universal components / Libraries / Scripting languages

Vendor: Python.org

Description

The vulnerability allows a remote non-authenticated attacker to manipulate data.

library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as demonstrated by irreproducible cancer-research results. NOTE: the effects of this documentation cross application domains, and thus it is likely that security-relevant code elsewhere is affected. This issue is not a Python implementation bug, and there are no reports that NMR researchers were specifically relying on library/glob.html. In other words, because the older documentation stated "finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell," one might have incorrectly inferred that the sorting that occurs in a Unix shell also occurred for glob.glob. There is a workaround in newer versions of Willoughby nmr-data_compilation-p2.py and nmr-data_compilation-p3.py, which call sort() directly.

Mitigation
Install update from vendor's website.

Vulnerable software versions

Python: 3.6.0, 3.7.0, 3.8.0

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External links
http://bugs.python.org/issue33275
http://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L380
http://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L405
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216/suppl_file/ol9b03216_si_002.zip
http://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191107-0005/
http://twitter.com/chris_bloke/status/1181997278136958976
http://twitter.com/LucasCMoore/status/1181615421922824192
http://usn.ubuntu.com/4428-1/
http://web.archive.org/web/20150822013622/
http://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20150906020027/
http://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20160309211341/
http://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20160526201356/
http://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
http://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies

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Q & A

Can this vulnerability be exploited remotely?

Yes. This vulnerability can be exploited by a remote non-authenticated attacker via the Internet.

Is there known malware, which exploits this vulnerability?

No. We are not aware of malware exploiting this vulnerability.