GHSA-4qpc-3hr4-r2p4

Symfony's YAML Parser Vulnerable to Exponential Memory Allocation via Recursive Collection-Alias Expansion ("Billion Laughs")

At a glance

Published
Updated
CVE
CVE-2026-45304
CVSS_V4
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U

Description

### Description `Symfony\Component\Yaml\Parser` resolves YAML aliases (`*anchor`) during parsing. Aliases that reference *collections* (arrays, `stdClass`, `TaggedValue`-wrapped collections) can themselves point to other collections containing aliases, creating exponential expansion at resolution time. A small input can blow up into a multi-gigabyte structure and exhaust memory: the classic "Billion Laughs" denial-of-service against any parser exposed to untrusted YAML. ### Resolution The `Parser` now counts collection alias resolutions in a shared `ParserState` object, with a default limit of **128**, following the [SnakeYAML model](https://github.com/snakeyaml/snakeyaml/blob/master/src/main/java/org/yaml/snakeyaml/LoaderOptions.java). Scalar aliases remain unrestricted since they cannot drive exponential growth. The limit is configurable via a new `$maxAliasesForCollections` argument on `Parser::__construct()`, `Yaml::parse()` and `Yaml::parseFile()`. A new `Yaml::PARSE_EXCEPTION_ON_ALIAS` flag also rejects all aliases outright when parsing fully untrusted input. The patch for this issue is available [here](https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/e77391b2e4f18821198f010d573674c8ed4a970a) for branch 5.4. ### Credits Symfony would like to thank Pietro Tirenna (Shielder) for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for fixing it.

Affected packages

PackageVersions
Packagist · symfony/yamlintroduced 0, fixed 5.4.52
Packagist · symfony/symfonyintroduced 0, fixed 5.4.52
Packagist · symfony/symfonyintroduced 6.0.0, fixed 6.4.40
Packagist · symfony/symfonyintroduced 7.0.0, fixed 7.4.12
Packagist · symfony/symfonyintroduced 8.0.0, fixed 8.0.12
Packagist · symfony/yamlintroduced 6.0.0, fixed 6.4.40
Packagist · symfony/yamlintroduced 7.0.0, fixed 7.4.12
Packagist · symfony/yamlintroduced 8.0.0, fixed 8.0.12

References

Sources

SourceLicence
OSV.devCC-BY 4.0 — GitHub Advisory Database