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[Bug]: Overly permissive regular expression range

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#734 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
cli, security

Research direction

The issue points to tests/integration/stackscripts/test_stackscripts.py at line 95; inspect the regular expression there and its existing coverage. Verify that the character ranges accept only the intended characters, update the relevant test or expression, and run the associated integration test.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug
CLI Version

v5.56.2

Command

https://github.com/linode/linode-cli/blob/fafe73e1f48a48ab9cbdf9b01f679e041f6bf3fa/tests/integration/stackscripts/test_stackscripts.py#L95-L95

It's easy to write a regular expression range that matches a wider range of characters than you intended. /[a-zA-z]/ matches all lowercase and all uppercase letters, as you would expect, but it also matches the characters: `[ \ ] ^ _ ``.

Another common problem is failing to escape the dash character in a regular expression. An unescaped dash is interpreted as part of a range. For example, in the character class [a-zA-Z0-9%=.,-_] the last character range matches the 55 characters between , and _ (both included), which overlaps with the range [0-9] and is clearly not intended by the writer.

Output

No response

Expected Behavior

[CWE-20

Actual Behavior

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command in Shell-quote
Exploiting CVE-2021-42740
no-obscure-range
The regex [,-.]
CWE-20.

Steps to Reproduce

POC

The following code is intended to check whether a string is a valid 6 digit hex color.

import re
def is_valid_hex_color(color):
    return re.match(r'^#[0-9a-fA-f]{6}$', color) is not None

However, the A-f range is overly large and matches every uppercase character. It would parse a "color" like #XXYYZZ as valid.

The fix is to use an uppercase A-F range instead.

import re
def is_valid_hex_color(color):
    return re.match(r'^#[0-9a-fA-F]{6}$', color) is not None

Recommendation

Avoid any confusion about which characters are included in the range by writing unambiguous regular expressions. Always check that character ranges match only the expected characters.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
442
Forks
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Avg merge
7d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
8

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