CVE-2014-5244
All 2.0.X, 2.1.X, 2.2.X, 2.3.X, 2.4.X, and 2.5.X versions of the Symfony HttpFoundation component are affected by this security issue.
This issue has been fixed in Symfony 2.3.19, 2.4.9, and 2.5.4. Note that no fixes are provided for Symfony 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 as they are not maintained anymore.
Description
When an arbitrarily long hostname is sent by a client, its parsing in Request::getHost() can lead to a DoS attack, due to the way we validate the hostname via a regular expression.
Resolution The regular expression used to parse and validate the hostname from the HTTP request has been modified to avoid too much sensitivity to the submitted value length.
The patch for this issue is available here: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/11828
| Software | From | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
symfony / http-foundation
|
2.0.0 | 2.3.19 |
|
symfony / http-foundation
|
2.4.0 | 2.4.9 |
|
symfony / http-foundation
|
2.5.0 | 2.5.4 |
|
symfony / symfony
|
2.0.0 | 2.3.19 |
|
symfony / symfony
|
2.4.0 | 2.4.9 |
|
symfony / symfony
|
2.5.0 | 2.5.4 |
- https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/symfony/http-foundation/CVE-2014-5244.yaml
- https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/symfony/symfony/CVE-2014-5244.yaml
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony/commit/1ee96a8b1b0987ffe2a62dca7ad268bf9edfa9b8
- https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/11828
- https://symfony.com/blog/cve-2014-5244-denial-of-service-with-a-malicious-http-host-header
- https://symfony.com/cve-2014-5244
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A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.
A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.
Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.
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