Denial of service via unbounded parsing and rescanning
Published Aug 23, 2026 · Updated Aug 23, 2026
Denial of service in JustHTML before 1.18.0 allows attackers to exhaust CPU or memory through crafted selectors or linkification input. Selector parsing and matching repeatedly rescan large trees, token lists, siblings, ancestors, and text without structural or work budgets, while cyclic DOM graphs can prevent traversal from terminating and Linkify repeatedly rescans punctuation-heavy text. Exposure requires an application to pass attacker-controlled selectors, large documents or DOM structure, or text to these opt-in paths; default JustHTML(sanitize=True) does not expose selector injection, and the impact is limited to availability.
Summary
What happened
Denial of service in JustHTML before 1.18.0 allows attackers to exhaust CPU or memory through crafted selectors or linkification input. Selector parsing and matching repeatedly rescan large trees, token lists, siblings, ancestors, and text without structural or work budgets, while cyclic DOM graphs can prevent traversal from terminating and Linkify repeatedly rescans punctuation-heavy text. Exposure requires an application to pass attacker-controlled selectors, large documents or DOM structure, or text to these opt-in paths; default JustHTML(sanitize=True) does not expose selector injection, and the impact is limited to availability.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-4671
- Published
- Aug 23, 2026
- Updated
- Aug 23, 2026
- Vendor
- Emil Stenström
- Product
- JustHTML
- Classifications
- CWE-407, CWE-400, CWE-835, T1499.003
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Aug 23, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Aug 23, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=0 <1.18.0
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
No public exploit references are available in this record.
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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