CVE-2026-4870 PUBLISHED

Qiskit SDK is vulnerable to specific functions may recurse too deeply and overflow the available stack space, when encountering certain classical expressions.

Assigner: ibm
Reserved: 25.03.2026 Published: 12.06.2026 Updated: 12.06.2026

IBM Qiskit SDK 0.43.0 through 2.5.0 could allow an attacker to trigger a segmentation fault leading to a denial of service due to uncontrolled recursion in the parser.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS Score: 7.5

Product Status

Vendor IBM
Product Qiskit SDK
Versions
  • affected from 0.43.0 to 2.5.0 (incl.)

Workarounds

Workarounds/Mitigation guidance:

None

Solutions

Remediation/Fixes guidance:

The issue is addressed in Qiskit versions v1.4.6 and v2.4.2. These are patched to error with a Python-space RecursionError exception once the expression depth exceeds the Python recursion limit which can be queried with sys.getrecursionlimit(). This limit can be adjusted by calling sys.setrecursionlimit(). Future versions of Qiskit may remove this limit entirely with a non-recursive version of the OpenQASM 2 parser.

Product(s)Version(s) number and/or range Remediation/Fix/Instructions<Qiskit SDK - qiskit.qasm2.loads() function>v1.4.6 and v2.4.2

Upgrade to the patched versions: qiskit v1.4.6 or qiskit v2.4.2.

<Qiskit SDK - QuantumCircuit.from_qasm_str function>v1.4.6 and v2.4.2

Upgrade to the patched versions: qiskit v1.4.6 or qiskit v2.4.2.

<Qiskit SDK - QuantumCircuit.from_qasm_str function>v1.4.6 and v2.4.2

Upgrade to the patched versions: qiskit v1.4.6 or qiskit v2.4.2.

Credits

  • This vulnerability was reported to IBM by Ali Sherif. finder

References