Denial of Service via Exponential Backtracking in ANTLR Search Query Parser in Gerrit Code Review

Summary

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400 / CWE-407) in the ANTLR 3 search query parser (QueryParser / Query.g) in Gerrit Code Review versions 2.0.19 through 3.12.9, 3.13.0 through 3.13.8, and 3.14.0 through 3.14.2 allows an unauthenticated remote attacker (or an authenticated user if anonymous read access is disabled) to cause a persistent denial of service (CPU exhaustion and HTTP worker thread pool starvation requiring a server restart) via crafted search queries containing deeply nested parentheses sent to query evaluation endpoints (/changes/?q=, /accounts/?q=, /groups/?query=, /projects/?query=, /Documentation/?q=, /changes/{id}/query?expression=, or SSH gerrit query). Because syntactic predicates in conditionOr and conditionAnd recurse via conditionBase without memoization prior to capability or visibility checks and worker threads do not abort when the client disconnects, a small number of requests (such as 25 requests matching default httpd.maxThreads) can permanently pin all HTTP worker threads. This issue is fixed in Gerrit Code Review versions 3.12.10, 3.13.9, and 3.14.3.

Timeline

1. Sep 24, 2026, 10:02 PM UTCCVE published
2. Sep 25, 2026, 4:45 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: poc · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial

3. Sep 25, 2026, 4:49 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• Gerrit Gerrit

  From 2.0.19 · fixed in 3.12.10; From 3.13.0 · fixed in 3.13.9; From 3.14.0 · fixed in 3.14.3

References 1