Symfony is a PHP framework for web and console applications and a set of reusable PHP components. From 7.3.0-BETA1 until 7.4.12 and 8.0.12, the JsonPath component compiles attacker-controlled match() and search() filter patterns directly into preg_match() without a length cap, i-regexp restriction, or bounded backtracking, allowing catastrophic-backtracking expressions to pin worker CPU and cause denial of service. This issue is fixed in versions 7.4.12 and 8.0.12.

Affected: Packagist: symfony/json-path, Packagist: symfony/symfony

### Description

The `JsonPath` component's `match()` and `search()` filter functions compile a caller-supplied pattern straight into `preg_match()`:

```php 'match' => @preg_match(\sprintf('/^%s$/u', $this->transformJsonPathRegex($argList[1])), $value), 'search' => @preg_match("/{$this->transformJsonPathRegex($argList[1])}/u", $value), ```

`transformJsonPathRegex()` only performs cosmetic escaping: there is no length cap, no restriction to the RFC 9485 i-regexp subset, and no bound on backtracking. An application that evaluates an attacker-influenced JSONPath expression server-side (e.g. one taken from a query parameter or API field and passed to `JsonCrawler`) can therefore be made to run a catastrophic-backtracking pattern such as `$[?search(@, "(a+)+$")]`. Evaluated against a moderately sized document, this pins a CPU core for seconds per request, so a handful of concurrent requests exhausts the worker pool: a denial of service. Because the `preg_match()` calls are prefixed with `@`, the PCRE backtrack-limit errors that would otherwise surface are suppressed, leaving no log trace.

### Conditions for exploitation

An application that evaluates an attacker-influenced JSONPath expression containing a `match()` / `search()` filter against any non-trivial JSON input.

### Resolution

`JsonCrawler` runs the `preg_match()` calls through a helper that lowers `pcre.backtrack_limit` to 10000 for the duration of the call (restoring the previous value afterwards), so a pathologic…

Affected: Ubuntu:16.04:LTS: symfony, Ubuntu:Pro:18.04:LTS: symfony, Ubuntu:Pro:20.04:LTS: symfony, Ubuntu:Pro:22.04:LTS: symfony, Ubuntu:Pro:24.04:LTS: symfony, Ubuntu:25.10: symfony, Ubuntu:26.04:LTS: symfony

Symfony is a PHP framework for web and console applications and a set of reusable PHP components. From 7.3.0-BETA1 until 7.4.12 and 8.0.12, the JsonPath component compiles attacker-controlled match() and search() filter patterns directly into preg_match() without a length cap, i-regexp restriction, or bounded backtracking, allowing catastrophic-backtracking expressions to pin worker CPU and cause denial of service. This issue is fixed in versions 7.4.12 and 8.0.12.