CVE-2013-7345: Christos Zoulas File

Medium severity, CVSS 5.0. EPSS: 3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The BEGIN regular expression in the awk script detector in magic/Magdir/commands in file before 5.15 uses multiple wildcards with unlimited repetitions, which allows context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) via a crafted ASCII file that triggers a large amount of backtracking, as demonstrated via a file with many newline characters.

Affected products

• Christos Zoulas File: before 5.15 (fixed in 5.15)
• Debian Debian Linux: version 6.0 only; version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only
• PHP PHP: from 5.4.0, before 5.4.27 (fixed in 5.4.27); from 5.5.0, before 5.5.11 (fixed in 5.5.11)

Published 2014-03-24. Last modified 2026-06-17.