CVE-2026-72912 PUBLISHED

CyberChef’s pretty-recipe parser vulnerable to client-side ReDoS / CPU exhaustion when parsing a malformed #recipe= URL

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 10.08.2026 Published: 10.08.2026 Updated: 10.08.2026

CyberChef is a web app for encryption, encoding, compression, and data analysis. Prior to 11.3.0, CyberChef's pretty-recipe parser in src/core/Utils.mjs can exhaust client-side CPU when a malformed #recipe= URL fragment containing a large number of unmatched quote characters reaches Utils.parseRecipeConfig(). The function synchronously applies a complex global regular expression that may perform heavy backtracking before rejecting the input, causing the victim's browser tab to freeze during startup for seconds or longer. No code execution, data exfiltration, or privilege escalation occurs. This issue is fixed in version 11.3.0.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS Score: 4.3

Product Status

Vendor gchq
Product CyberChef
Versions
  • Version < 11.3.0 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption CWE
  • CWE-1333: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity CWE