CVE-2019-17514

Summary

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.

Impact & exploitability

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Affected products we track (1)

Recommendation

Apply the vendor fix promptly. Open any affected product above for its exact safe version.

Additional information

• NVD record
• https://bugs.python.org/issue33275Advisory
• https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216Advisory
• https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216/suppl_file/ol9b03216_si_002.zipAdvisory
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20191107-0005/
• https://twitter.com/LucasCMoore/status/1181615421922824192Advisory
• https://twitter.com/chris_bloke/status/1181997278136958976Advisory
• https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L380Advisory
• https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L405Advisory