Service stall via quadratic selector trimming
Published Sep 17, 2026 · Updated Sep 22, 2026
Regular expression denial of service in Soup Sieve before 2.9 allows remote attackers to stall services through crafted CSS selectors. In selector_iter, the unanchored RE_WS_END.search operation retries greedy whitespace or comment matching at every offset, causing quadratic CPU work. Exploitation requires an application to pass attacker-controlled selectors to compile or select; hard-coded selectors are unaffected, and the consequence is CPU exhaustion that can hold the GIL and stall workers without memory corruption or code execution.
Summary
What happened
Regular expression denial of service in Soup Sieve before 2.9 allows remote attackers to stall services through crafted CSS selectors. In selector_iter, the unanchored RE_WS_END.search operation retries greedy whitespace or comment matching at every offset, causing quadratic CPU work. Exploitation requires an application to pass attacker-controlled selectors to compile or select; hard-coded selectors are unaffected, and the consequence is CPU exhaustion that can hold the GIL and stall workers without memory corruption or code execution.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-85999
- Published
- Sep 17, 2026
- Updated
- Sep 22, 2026
- Vendor
- facelessuser
- Product
- Soup Sieve
- Classifications
- CWE-400, CWE-1333, T1499.004
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Sep 17, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Sep 22, 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=< 2.9
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
CVSS describes severity. EPSS estimates exploitation probability.
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.
Activity data is delayed. The latest report is Sep 28, 2026.
Weakness, pattern, technique
Public exploit references
- Upstream selector-trimming ReDoS proof of conceptproof of concept · demonstrated
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Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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