CVE-2026-104844 PUBLISHED

PostCSS: Quadratic complexity in flat selector parsing allows CPU exhaustion

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 02.10.2026 Published: 02.10.2026 Updated: 02.10.2026

PostCSS Selector Parser is a CSS selector parser that integrates with PostCSS but does not require it. Prior to 7.1.6, src/parser.js splitWord() can receive a flat selector as one word token carrying many class or ID indexes because period and hash characters are not tokenizer word delimiters. The uniqs() deduplication and per-index class and ID membership checks repeatedly scan the class and ID index arrays, while a separate Sass-interpolation filtering pass also performs repeated linear scanning. Together, these passes make parsing quadratic in the number of indexes and allow a crafted selector to occupy a synchronous parser thread. The maxNestingDepth guard does not mitigate the issue because the hostile selector can have zero nesting depth. Only consumers that synchronously parse untrusted selectors in an exposed request path are affected; ordinary build-time parsing of trusted sources is not affected. This issue is fixed in version 7.1.6.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS Score: 5.9

Product Status

Vendor postcss
Product postcss-selector-parser
Versions
  • Version < 7.1.6 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption CWE
  • CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity CWE