Applications that use hardcoded templates or that only allow users to provide variable values are not affected by this issue.
Impact
The direct issue in DictPromptTemplate and ImagePromptTemplate allowed attribute access and indexing expressions to survive template construction and then be evaluated during formatting. When richer Python objects were passed into formatting, this could expose internal fields or nested data to prompt output, model context, or logs.
The nested format-spec issue is narrower in scope. It bypassed the intended validation rules for f-string templates, but in simple cases it results in an invalid format specifier error rather than direct disclosure. Accordingly, its practical impact is lower than that of direct top-level attribute traversal.
Overall, the practical severity depends on deployment. Meaningful confidentiality impact requires attacker control over the template structure itself, and higher impact further depends on the surrounding application passing richer internal Python objects into formatting.
Fix
The fix consists of two changes.
First, LangChain now applies f-string safety validation consistently to DictPromptTemplate and ImagePromptTemplate, so templates containing attribute access or indexing expressions are rejected during construction and deserialization.
Second, LangChain now rejects nested replacement fields inside f-string format specifiers.
Concretely, LangChain validates parsed f-string fields and raises an error for:
variable names containing attribute access or indexing syntax such as . or []
The fix preserves ordinary f-string formatting features such as standard format specifiers and conversions, including examples like:
"{value:.2f}"
"{value:>10}"
"{value!r}"
In addition, the explicit template-validation path now applies the same structural f-string checks before performing placeholder validation, ensuring that the security checks and validation checks remain aligned.