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fix(output): 19 quadratic regex runs on the output path, worst ~5.7h at the cap

The output gate claimed LLM10 self-safety on the grounds that its patterns have
no nested quantifiers. True, and irrelevant: nesting is not what makes these
blow up. A run in front of a REQUIRED literal, reachable from a short anchor, is
enough -- crafted input repeats the anchor and never supplies the literal, so
every start position rescans the tail. Quadratic, not exponential, and the
max_scan_chars cap does not help: it bounds the input, and quadratic work on a
bounded input is still hours.

Measured, not argued. `<a:` x 100_000 took 23.4s in AUTOLINK_RE alone; the
composed gate on that payload took 458.7s, extrapolating to ~5.7 hours at the
1_000_000-char input the gate itself accepts. Size-matched ordinary prose runs
0.31s, so the separation is 18x-660x -- unlike the blob in the neighbouring
test, which is the *faster* side of prose and never exercised backtracking.

Two fixes, chosen per pattern rather than uniformly:

- active_content + lexicon JSON (15 runs): exclude the character that opens the
  pattern's own anchor (`[` for markdown, `<` for tags), so a run cannot reach
  past the next start position and the per-start costs telescope. Verified to
  cost no recall: long URLs, long alt text, and `<` inside a quoted attribute
  all still match. Bounding instead would have been linear too but wrong here --
  the content is attacker-controlled, so padding past a bound would be a
  one-line bypass of the EchoLeak class this table exists to catch.
- connstr egress (4 runs): bound the password at MAX_CONNSTR_VALUE. The
  exclusion fix is unavailable -- the anchor character is `/` and passwords
  containing `/` are the common case (measured: they match today). The residual
  miss is a credential over 256 chars; a token that long is still caught by
  egress:jwt-token.

hybrid-xss:script-tag had neither option: its run is the script BODY, which may
legitimately contain `<`. It now matches the opening tag and drops the
`</script>` requirement. That also closes a fail-open -- `<script>alert(1)`
unclosed was silently missed -- at the cost of flagging prose that merely
mentions `<script>`, now documented.

Found by the composed-gate test staying red after every individual scanner was
already linear: the lexicon's six html-obfuscation patterns were the remaining
813x. A per-scanner test alone would have shipped that.

662 passed (was 642), and faster than before the fix.
This commit is contained in:
Kjell Tore Guttormsen 2026-07-31 18:31:58 +02:00
commit cff043787d
10 changed files with 220 additions and 30 deletions

View file

@ -134,6 +134,24 @@ def test_scan_hybrid_pattern_is_high():
assert hit.severity is Severity.HIGH
def test_unclosed_script_tag_is_flagged():
# The pattern matches the OPENING tag and does not require `</script>`.
# Requiring the closing tag was a fail-open -- an unclosed `<script>` is
# still active content, and it was silently missed. (It was also the last
# quadratic-backtracking site on the output path: requiring the closing tag
# made every `<script` start rescan the tail. Both are fixed by the same
# change; the DoS side is pinned in tests/test_output.py.)
r = scan_lexicon("<script>alert(1)")
assert any(f.label == "hybrid-xss:script-tag" for f in r.findings)
def test_script_body_containing_an_angle_bracket_still_matches():
# Guards the fix that was NOT taken: excluding `<` from the script body
# would have been linear too, but would have dropped this real match.
r = scan_lexicon("<script>if(a<b){leak()}</script>")
assert any(f.label == "hybrid-xss:script-tag" for f in r.findings)
def test_scan_medium_pattern():
r = scan_lexicon("Dear AI, please help me.")
assert r.max_severity() is Severity.MEDIUM