CVE-2026-121691

Unbounded decompression in the whatstk ZIP loader exhausts memory and disk

Published Nov 10, 2026 CVSS 4.0 · 6.7 Medium EPSS < 1% KEV · Not listed
Description
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (CWE-409) in the ZIP loader of whatstk from 0.7.0 before 0.9.0 allows a party that supplies a chat export to exhaust the memory and the disk of the process that parses it, because _str_from_file() (whatstk/whatsapp/parser.py) calls zip_ref.extractall() with no bound on the size of the members and no check of the compression ratio, then reads the extracted file in full with f.read(). The only guard on the archive counts the extracted files and raises when there is not exactly one, but it runs after extractall() has already written them, so it does not prevent the cost. _clean_text() then passes the whole text through unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text), which holds a second copy, and the parse builds a list of regular expression matches and a DataFrame over it, so peak memory is a multiple of the decompressed text rather than of the archive. A ZIP is a documented input of WhatsAppChat.from_source() and df_from_whatsapp(), and is the form in which WhatsApp exports a chat on iOS, so the attacker supplies the whole file. This results in a small upload costing hundreds of megabytes of memory and of disk, and in the process being killed where that exceeds what is available.

Remediation

Vendor Solution

Upgrade to whatstk 0.9.0 or later, which rejects a source larger than 50 MB by default and accepts a max_size argument to lower that bound.

Tracking

Sign in to view the affected projects.

Advisories

No advisories available
History
Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (CWE-409) in the ZIP loader of whatstk from 0.7.0 before 0.9.0 allows a party that supplies a chat export to exhaust the memory and the disk of the process that parses it, because _str_from_file() (whatstk/whatsapp/parser.py) calls zip_ref.extractall() with no bound on the size of the members and no check of the compression ratio, then reads the extracted file in full with f.read(). The only guard on the archive counts the extracted files and raises when there is not exactly one, but it runs after extractall() has already written them, so it does not prevent the cost. _clean_text() then passes the whole text through unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text), which holds a second copy, and the parse builds a list of regular expression matches and a DataFrame over it, so peak memory is a multiple of the decompressed text rather than of the archive. A ZIP is a documented input of WhatsAppChat.from_source() and df_from_whatsapp(), and is the form in which WhatsApp exports a chat on iOS, so the attacker supplies the whole file. This results in a small upload costing hundreds of megabytes of memory and of disk, and in the process being killed where that exceeds what is available.
Title Unbounded decompression in the whatstk ZIP loader exhausts memory and disk
First Time appeared Lucasrodes
Lucasrodes whatstk
Weaknesses CWE-409
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:lucasrodes:whatstk:*:*:*:*:*:python:*:*
Vendors & Products Lucasrodes
Lucasrodes whatstk
References
Metrics cvssV4_0

{'score': 6.7, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N'}

Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
Secur0
Published
Updated
Nov 10, 2026, 5:29 PM
Reserved
Nov 3, 2026, 8:07 PM
Status
Deferred
Published
Nov 10, 2026, 6:17 PM
Modified
Nov 12, 2026, 10:11 PM