eml_parser vulnerable to DoS via deeply nested parens in Received headers

Overview

Summary

eml_parser strips parenthesised CFWS comments from Received: headers using a regex-based fix-point loop. The loop has quadratic time complexity in the number of nested parens. A single Received: header containing 5,000 nested parens causes ~1.3 seconds of CPU saturation per parsed message; runtime quadruples per doubling of nesting depth.

Impact

This represents a CPU exhaustion DoS in any pipeline that processes attacker-supplied EML files. An attacker can create relatively small EML files that will take multiple seconds to parse.

This is particularly problematic for synchronous email-processing pipelines (gateways, sandboxes, real-time triage) where worker latency directly translates to queue backpressure and possible service-level outages.

Patches

Since version 3.0.2, eml_parser uses a linear-time algorithm to remove the comments from Received: headers.

Affected packages

• eml-parser < 3.0.2

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• eml-parser 3.0.2