expr-lang expr up to 1.17.6 on Go flatten/min/max/mean/median allocation of resources

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in expr-lang expr up to 1.17.6 on Go and classified as problematic. The affected element is the function flatten/min/max/mean/median. Such manipulation leads to allocation of resources. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2025-68156. The attack may be launched remotely. There is no exploit available. It is suggested to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in expr-lang expr up to 1.17.6 on Go. It has been rated as problematic. Affected by this issue is the function flatten/min/max/mean/median. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a allocation of resources vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-770. The product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated, in violation of the intended security policy for that actor. Impacted is availability. CVE summarizes:

Expr is an expression language and expression evaluation for Go. Prior to version 1.17.7, several builtin functions in Expr, including `flatten`, `min`, `max`, `mean`, and `median`, perform recursive traversal over user-provided data structures without enforcing a maximum recursion depth. If the evaluation environment contains deeply nested or cyclic data structures, these functions may recurse indefinitely until exceed the Go runtime stack limit. This results in a stack overflow panic, causing the host application to crash. While exploitability depends on whether an attacker can influence or inject cyclic or pathologically deep data into the evaluation environment, this behavior represents a denial-of-service (DoS) risk and affects overall library robustness. Instead of returning a recoverable evaluation error, the process may terminate unexpectedly. In affected versions, evaluation of expressions that invoke certain builtin functions on untrusted or insufficiently validated data structures can lead to a process-level crash due to stack exhaustion. This issue is most relevant in scenarios where Expr is used to evaluate expressions against externally supplied or dynamically constructed environments; cyclic references (directly or indirectly) can be introduced into arrays, maps, or structs; and there are no application-level safeguards preventing deeply nested input data. In typical use cases with controlled, acyclic data, the issue may not manifest. However, when present, the resulting panic can be used to reliably crash the application, constituting a denial of service. The issue has been fixed in the v1.17.7 versions of Expr. The patch introduces a maximum recursion depth limit for affected builtin functions. When this limit is exceeded, evaluation aborts gracefully and returns a descriptive error instead of panicking. Additionally, the maximum depth can be customized by users via `builtin.MaxDepth`, allowing applications with legitimate deep structures to raise the limit in a controlled manner. Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the patched release, which includes both the recursion guard and comprehensive test coverage to prevent regressions. For users who cannot immediately upgrade, some mitigations are recommended. Ensure that evaluation environments cannot contain cyclic references, validate or sanitize externally supplied data structures before passing them to Expr, and/or wrap expression evaluation with panic recovery to prevent a full process crash (as a last-resort defensive measure). These workarounds reduce risk but do not fully eliminate the issue without the patch.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2025-68156 since 12/16/2025. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. This vulnerability is assigned to T1499 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 279263 (RHEL 10 : opentelemetry-collector (RHSA-2025:23664)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading to version 1.17.7 eliminates this vulnerability. Applying a patch is able to eliminate this problem. The bugfix is ready for download at github.com. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

The vulnerability is also documented in the databases at Tenable (279263) and CERT Bund (WID-SEC-2025-2886). If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Affected

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Oracle Linux
• SUSE openSUSE
• RESF Rocky Linux

Productinfo

Vendor

• expr-lang

Name

• expr

Version

• 1.17.0
• 1.17.1
• 1.17.2
• 1.17.3
• 1.17.4
• 1.17.5
• 1.17.6

Website

• Product: https://github.com/expr-lang/expr/

CPE 2.3info

• 🔒
• 🔒
• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

• 🔒
• 🔒
• 🔒

CVSSv4info

CVSSv3info

CVSSv2info

Exploitinginfo

Threat Intelligenceinfo

Countermeasuresinfo

Timelineinfo

Sourcesinfo

Entryinfo

If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Discussion