CVE-2026-119197: pyasn1 has quadratic-complexity denial of service in binary REAL decoding — Fixed versions

Summary

## Summary In pyasn1 0.6.4 and earlier, decoding a binary-encoded ASN.1 REAL with a large mantissa can consume CPU time quadratic in the mantissa length. The BER, CER, and DER decoders all use the affected `RealPayloadDecoder`. An application is exposed when it passes attacker-controlled ASN.1 containing a REAL value to one of these decoders, either without an `asn1Spec` or with a schema that includes REAL. The work occurs inside `decode()`; the application does not need to convert, print, or otherwise use the resulting REAL object. This is distinct from [CVE-2026-59886](https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-hm4w-wwcw-mr6r), which concerns converting an already-decoded REAL to a Python float. That issue was fixed in 0.6.4 and its advisory states that decoding alone does not trigger it. ## Root cause and affected components For binary REAL values, [`RealPayloadDecoder.valueDecoder` in v0.6.4](https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/blob/v0.6.4/pyasn1/codec/ber/decoder.py#L535-L603) builds the mantissa one octet at a time: ```python p = 0 while chunk: p <<= 8 p |= chunk[0] chunk = chunk[1:] ``` Each shift processes an integer that grows with the mantissa; with byte strings, each slice also copies the remaining suffix. Repeating both operations for every octet makes decoding quadratic in mantissa size. The decoder's [eight-octet length-field limit](https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/blob/v0.6.4/pyasn1/codec/ber/decoder.py#L1704-L1717) does not impose a practical mantissa-size limit for the inputs demonstrated below. [CER](https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/blob/v0.6.4/pyasn1/codec/cer/decoder.py#L51-L62) and [DER](https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/blob/v0.6.4/pyasn1/codec/der/decoder.py#L23-L31) reuse the BER REAL payload decoder, so all three paths reach this loop. The vulnerable loop is present in every available repository release tag inspected, from v0.2.1 through v0.6.4. Runtime measurements below were made on v0.6.4; older releases were checked for the loop, not benchmarked in…

Remediation

Inventory every pyasn1 deployment, including staging.
Upgrade pyasn1 to 0.6.5.
Confirm the running version after the upgrade.

Summary

Remediation

References