Hello,

In the C# security analysis suite, the query Denial of Service from comparison of user input against expensive regex (cs/redos) relies heavily on underlying helper logic to flag regular expressions with potential exponential behavior. Specifically, in csharp/ql/lib/semmle/code/csharp/security/dataflow/ReDoSQuery.qll (lines 58–72). This uses a set of hardcoded regular expressions via regexpMatch to identify string literals that represent exponential (ReDoS-vulnerable) regular expressions.

While these three variations catch patterns like ([a-z]+.)+, they are fragile syntactic approximations. This approach misses variations of overlapping or nested quantifiers, creating a scenario where dangerous regex structures easily bypass the query's detection due to minor structural variations.

For example the query overlooks risky patterns like these:

• Nested Quantifiers without literals: (a*)*b or (x+)*
• Overlapping Alternations/Sequences: (x+x+)+y
• Complex or Distant Structural Paths: Patterns that contain non-trivial prefixes/suffixes or specific character class structures can fail to match the strict capture-group structures defined in the QL code. Depending on the engine evaluating these meta-regexes, they could themselves face performance degradation when scanning highly complex, non-matching input paths.

This issue stood out because these specific pattern variants can easily slip through the ReDoS query undetected. This creates a gap between the security results and the actual risk. I'm wondering if it would be possible address this in a future version?

Version: 2.26.0