CVE-2026-121691
Received
Received - Intake
Memory Exhaustion in whatstk ZIP Parser
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-121691, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-11-10
Last updated on: 2026-11-10
Assigner: Secur0
Description
Description
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (CWE-409) in the ZIP loader of whatstk from 0.7.0 before 0.9.0 allows a party that supplies a chat export to exhaust the memory and the disk of the process that parses it, because _str_from_file() (whatstk/whatsapp/parser.py) calls zip_ref.extractall() with no bound on the size of the members and no check of the compression ratio, then reads the extracted file in full with f.read(). The only guard on the archive counts the extracted files and raises when there is not exactly one, but it runs after extractall() has already written them, so it does not prevent the cost. _clean_text() then passes the whole text through unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text), which holds a second copy, and the parse builds a list of regular expression matches and a DataFrame over it, so peak memory is a multiple of the decompressed text rather than of the archive. A ZIP is a documented input of WhatsAppChat.from_source() and df_from_whatsapp(), and is the form in which WhatsApp exports a chat on iOS, so the attacker supplies the whole file. This results in a small upload costing hundreds of megabytes of memory and of disk, and in the process being killed where that exceeds what is available.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| lucasrodes | whatstk | From 0.7.0 (inc) to 0.9.0 (exc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-409 | The product does not handle or incorrectly handles a compressed input with a very high compression ratio that produces a large output. |
