GHSA-vp6j-j7w5-5xjj

PyMongo: PYTHON-5986 Host injection in PyMongo connection string parsing via percent-encoded delimiters

At a glance

Published
Updated
CVE
CVE-2026-96748
Aliases
PYSEC-2026-4297
CVSS_V3
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N
CVSS_V4
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Description

### Summary PyMongo percent-decoded the entire host section of a connection string before splitting it into individual `host:port` entries. A percent-encoded `,` or `:` in a hostname therefore decoded into a real delimiter, injecting an additional attacker-chosen host and port into the client's seed list. ### Impact An application that interpolates untrusted input into a MongoDB connection string -- for example, a tenant name or hostname fragment taken from a request -- could be made to add an attacker-controlled server to the seed list. Because `%2C` and `%3A` survive most URL-safety checks and only become delimiters inside PyMongo's parser, input that looks like a single hostname to the application becomes two hosts to the driver. The client may then perform topology discovery and authentication against the attacker's host, exposing credentials, or route operations to it. Unix domain socket paths, the only host identifiers that legitimately require percent-encoding, are not affected. ### Patches Fixed in PyMongo 4.18.2. Percent-decoding was moved into `split_hosts` and now applies only to Unix domain socket paths, identified by an unescaped `.sock` suffix before decoding, and only after splitting on `,`. ### Workarounds Do not interpolate untrusted input into the host portion of a connection string. If unavoidable, reject or percent-decode-and-validate the value before building the URI. ### Details The decoding was introduced in PyMongo 3.5.0 (PYTHON-1282), where `unquote_plus` was applied to the whole host section in `_validate_uri` and, later, `_parse_srv`, before the string was split on `,` and `:`.

Affected packages

PackageVersions
PyPI · pymongointroduced 3.5.0, fixed 4.18.2

References

Sources

SourceLicence
OSV.devCC-BY 4.0 — GitHub Advisory Database