Affected: Apache Software Foundation Apache OpenNLP

The two built-in name-finder patterns exposed by opennlp.tools.namefind.RegexNameFinderFactory - DEFAULT_REGEX_NAME_FINDER.EMAIL and DEFAULT_REGEX_NAME_FINDER.URL - contain ambiguous nested quantifiers. An application that obtains these finders through RegexNameFinderFactory.getDefaultRegexNameFinders(...) and then applies them to untrusted text through RegexNameFinder.find(String[]) or RegexNameFinder.find(String) can be driven into super-linear backtracking or into unbounded matcher recursion by a small crafted input.

For the EMAIL pattern, a long run of local-part characters that is never followed by an @ forces the matcher to re-scan to end-of-input from every starting offset. Cost grows quadratically with input length: an input of approximately 32 KB consumes several seconds of CPU in a single find() call and returns no match, and each doubling of the input multiplies the cost roughly four-fold.

For the URL pattern, the query-string sub-expression nests a capturing repetition inside an outer repetition. The JDK matcher recurses once per query token, so an input of approximately 4 KB containing many &-separated tokens exhausts the thread stack and causes java.lang.StackOverflowError to propagate out of find(), terminating the calling thread. On a thread created with a smaller stack (for example -Xss512k, typical of server worker pools) approximately 1 KB is sufficient.

In both cases an attacker who can supply text for analysis can convert a single request…