QWED: Authenticated Remote Code Execution via Unsafe SymPy `parse_expr()`

Summary

QWED is open-source AI verification infrastructure for deterministic verification of LLM outputs, tool calls, code, schemas, and agent state before production execution. Prior to 5.1.2, the qwed package passes caller-controlled math expressions directly to SymPy parse_expr() without restricted global_dict and local_dict namespaces, allowing Python eval() to resolve builtins and execute arbitrary Python code in the API server process. In src/qwed_new/api/main.py, POST /verify/math is protected by get_current_tenant but accepts any valid tenant API key, reads the expression field, applies only a cosmetic re.sub(r'(\d)(()', r'\1*\2', expression) normalization, and passes the result to parse_expr(). In src/qwed_new/core/batch.py, POST /verify/batch sends math items through batch_service.create_job(), stores item.query verbatim, and _verify_item() passes VerificationType.MATH input to parse_expr() without sanitization. The default-enabled POST /auth/signup endpoint allows anyone to create a standard tenant account, POST /auth/api-keys issues an x-api-key, and either vulnerable path can then be used to read or write files, modify data, execute operating system commands, terminate the service, and compromise other tenants in a shared deployment. This issue is fixed in version 5.1.2.

Timeline

1. Aug 25, 2026, 4:23 PM UTCCVE published
2. Aug 28, 2026, 10:29 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

3. Aug 28, 2026, 10:29 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• QWED-AI qwed-verification

  fixed in 5.1.2

• qwedPyPI

  fixed in 5.1.2

References 4