Pathway - Unauthenticated Denial of Service via Exponential Glob Pattern Matching in Document Store

Summary

Pathway through 0.31.1, fixed in commit d09722e, document store applies a caller-supplied glob pattern to indexed document paths using a hand-written recursive matcher that branches two ways on each ** token without memoization, giving exponential worst-case complexity. The filepath_globpattern value is taken from the body of the unauthenticated HTTP endpoints /v1/retrieve, /v1/inputs and /v2/answer and compiled into a filter evaluated once per indexed document, with no length or **-count limit. A remote unauthenticated attacker can submit a short pattern containing many ** tokens to consume CPU for tens of seconds per request, and a small number of requests denies service.