Executive brief
PraisonAI is a system used to manage and coordinate teams of AI agents. A security flaw allows an attacker to send a specially crafted search query that freezes the application's processing engine. This results in a complete service outage, preventing the AI agents from performing their tasks and disrupting operations.
Technical details
A Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability exists in the MCPToolIndex.search_tools() function of PraisonAI. The root cause is the direct compilation of user-provided strings into Python regular expressions using the 're' module without validation or execution timeouts. An attacker can provide a regex pattern designed to trigger catastrophic backtracking, such as '(a+)+