Parts of the Scrapy API were found to be vulnerable to a ReDoS attack. Handling a malicious response could cause extreme CPU and memory usage during the parsing of its content, due to the use of vulnerable regular expressions for that parsing.

A Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability exists in the XMLFeedSpider class of the scrapy/scrapy project, specifically in the parsing of XML content. By crafting malicious XML content that exploits inefficient regular expression complexity used in the parsing process, an attacker can cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability allows for the system to hang and consume significant resources, potentially rendering services that utilize Scrapy for XML processing unresponsive.