CVE-2019-17514

Potentially misleading information in Python documentation

• CVSS 7.5
• CWE-682: Incorrect Calculation
• Information Leakage
• Local

library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as demonstrated by irreproducible cancer-research results. NOTE: the effects of this documentation cross application domains, and thus it is likely that security-relevant code elsewhere is affected. This issue is not a Python implementation bug, and there are no reports that NMR researchers were specifically relying on library/glob.html. In other words, because the older documentation stated "finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell," one might have incorrectly inferred that the sorting that occurs in a Unix shell also occurred for glob.glob. There is a workaround in newer versions of Willoughby nmr-data_compilation-p2.py and nmr-data_compilation-p3.py, which call sort() directly.

CVE

CVE-2019-17514

CWE

CWE-682: Incorrect Calculation

CVSS base score

7.5

Published

2019-10-12

OWASP

A04 Insecure Design

Orthogonal defect classification

Interface

Code defect classification

Incorrect Interface

Category

Information Leakage

Subcategory

Insecure Handling of Sensitive Data

Accessibility scope

Local

Impact

Information Disclosure

Fixed by upgrading

Yes

Solution

Update the Python documentation to clarify that glob.glob does not guarantee sorting and recommend using sorted(glob.glob(…)) for sorted results.

import glob

files = glob.glob("*.txt")

with open("output.txt", "w") as output:
    for file in files:
        with open(file, "r") as input:
            output.write(input.read())

import glob
import os

files = glob.glob("*.txt")

valid_files = [f for f in files if os.path.isfile(f) and os.access(f, os.R_OK)]

with open("output.txt", "w") as output:
    for file in valid_files:
        try:
            with open(file, "r") as input:
                output.write(input.read())
        except Exception as e:
            print(f"Error reading file {file}: {e}")

@misc{vaitp:cve201917514,
  title        = {{Potentially misleading information in Python documentation}},
  author       = {Bogaerts, Fr\'ed\'eric and Ivaki, Naghmeh and Fonseca, Jos\'e},
  year         = {2019},
  note         = {VAITP Python Vulnerability Dataset, entry CVE-2019-17514},
  howpublished = {\url{https://netpack.pt/vaitp/vulnerability/CVE-2019-17514/}}
}