Zulip attempts to validate that the regular expressions that admins
enter for linkifiers are well-formatted, and only contain a specific
subset of regex grammar. The process of checking these
properties (via a regex!) can cause denial-of-service via
backtracking.
Furthermore, this validation itself does not prevent the creation of
linkifiers which themselves cause denial-of-service when they are
executed. As the validator accepts literally anything inside of a
`(?P<word>...)` block, any quadratic backtracking expression can be
hidden therein.
Switch user-provided linkifier patterns to be matched in the Markdown
processor by the `re2` library, which is guaranteed constant-time.
This somewhat limits the possible features of the regular
expression (notably, look-head and -behind, and back-references);
however, these features had never been advertised as working in the
context of linkifiers.
A migration removes any existing linkifiers which would not function
under re2, after printing them for posterity during the upgrade; they
are unlikely to be common, and are impossible to fix automatically.
The denial-of-service in the linkifier validator was discovered by
@erik-krogh and @yoff, as GHSL-2021-118.
Zixuan James Li
Alex Vandiver