Vulnerability CVE-2019-17514
Published: 2019-10-12

Description:
library/glob.html in the Python 2 and 3 documentation before 2016 has potentially misleading information about whether sorting occurs, as demonstrated by irreproducible cancer-research results. NOTE: the effects of this documentation cross application domains, and thus it is likely that security-relevant code elsewhere is affected. This issue is not a Python implementation bug, and there are no reports that NMR researchers were specifically relying on library/glob.html. In other words, because the older documentation stated "finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell," one might have incorrectly inferred that the sorting that occurs in a Unix shell also occurred for glob.glob. There is a workaround in newer versions of Willoughby nmr-data_compilation-p2.py and nmr-data_compilation-p3.py, which call sort() directly.

 References:
https://bugs.python.org/issue33275
https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L380
https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/ac50fbac377e32b98d2de396f016ea81e8ee9961/pathexp.c#L405
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216/suppl_file/ol9b03216_si_002.zip
https://twitter.com/LucasCMoore/status/1181615421922824192
https://web.archive.org/web/20150822013622/https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150906020027/https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160309211341/https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160526201356/https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/glob.html
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies
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