CVE-2019-17514

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.

Weakness

The product performs a calculation that generates incorrect or unintended results that are later used in security-critical decisions or resource management.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use languages, libraries, or frameworks that make it easier to handle numbers without unexpected consequences.
• Examples include safe integer handling packages such as SafeInt (C++) or IntegerLib (C or C++).
• Use languages, libraries, or frameworks that make it easier to handle numbers without unexpected consequences.
• Examples include safe integer handling packages such as SafeInt (C++) or IntegerLib (C or C++).

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/128.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/129.html

References

• https://bugs.python.org/issue33275
• https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L380
• https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L405
• https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216
• https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216/suppl_file/ol9b03216_si_002.zip
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191107-0005/
• https://twitter.com/LucasCMoore/status/1181615421922824192
• https://twitter.com/chris_bloke/status/1181997278136958976
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4428-1/
• https://web.archive.org/web/20150822013622/https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20150906020027/https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160309211341/https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160526201356/https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
• https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies