Symfony\Component\Yaml\Parser is the entry point for parsing YAML strings into PHP values via Yaml::parse(). When the parser is exposed to attacker-controlled input, deeply nested mappings or sequences cause both the block-level (Parser::parseBlock()) and inline (Inline::parseSequence() / Inline::parseMapping()) parsers to recurse without a depth limit. A crafted document exhausts the PHP stack and crashes the worker.
The Parser now tracks recursion depth in a shared ParserState object across both block-level and inline parsing, with a default limit of 128. The limit is configurable via a new $maxNestingLevel argument on Parser::__construct(), Yaml::parse() and Yaml::parseFile().
The patch for this issue is available here for branch 5.4.
Symfony would like to thank Pietro Tirenna (Shielder) for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for fixing it.
{
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-1333",
"CWE-674",
"CWE-776"
],
"github_reviewed": true,
"github_reviewed_at": "2026-05-27T21:33:07Z",
"nvd_published_at": null,
"severity": "LOW"
}