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symfony/polyfill-intl-idn accepts xn-- labels whose Punycode payload decodes to ASCII-only: insecure equivalence

Moderate
nicolas-grekas published GHSA-2xf4-cg6j-vhgq May 26, 2026

Package

composer symfony/polyfill (Composer)

Affected versions

>= 1.17.1,<1.38.1

Patched versions

1.38.1
composer symfony/polyfill-intl-idn (Composer)
>= 1.17.1,<1.38.1
1.38.1

Description

Description

symfony/polyfill-intl-idn provides a userland implementation of idn_to_utf8() and idn_to_ascii() for runtimes that lack the intl extension. Its Idn::process() method decodes labels prefixed with xn-- using Punycode but never enforces the validity criterion added in UTS #46 revision 33 Section 4 step 4.1.2: after a successful Punycode decode, the result must contain at least one non-ASCII code point.

As a consequence, xn-- labels whose Punycode payload is empty (xn--) or decodes to a string made of only ASCII code points (e.g. xn--kc1zs4-) are accepted by the polyfill while PHP's native ext-intl rejects them with IDNA_ERROR_INVALID_ACE_LABEL. Originally unequal domain names are therefore regarded as equal, which can lead to blacklist bypassing, inconsistent URL parsing and server-side request forgery (similar to CVE-2024-12224).

Example with IDNA_USE_STD3_RULES | IDNA_CHECK_BIDI | IDNA_CHECK_CONTEXTJ | IDNA_NONTRANSITIONAL_TO_ASCII:

Input Polyfill output Native ext-intl output
poc.xn--kc1zs4-.com poc.kc1zs4.com false (errors=1024)
poc.kc1zs4.xn-- poc.kc1zs4. false (errors=1024)

Applications using the polyfill to canonicalise or compare hostnames inherit the inconsistency.

Resolution

Idn::process() now records IDNA_ERROR_INVALID_ACE_LABEL when a Punycode payload decodes to an empty string or to a string containing only ASCII code points, matching the native ext-intl behaviour and UTS #46 revision 33.

The patch for this issue is available here for branch 1.x.

Credits

We would like to thank Nazy Mad for reporting the issue and Nicolas Grekas for providing the fix.

Severity

Moderate

CVE ID

CVE-2026-46644

Weaknesses

Improper Validation of Unsafe Equivalence in Input

The product receives an input value that is used as a resource identifier or other type of reference, but it does not validate or incorrectly validates that the input is equivalent to a potentially-unsafe value. Learn more on MITRE.

Credits