CVE-2026-83606 PUBLISHED

xmldom PI grammar regex ReDoS: quadratic backtracking on unterminated processing instructions

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 31.08.2026 Published: 01.09.2026 Updated: 01.09.2026

xmldom is a pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module. From 0.9.0-beta.9 until 0.9.11, the processing-instruction production in lib/grammar.js lets the greedy S+ separator and lazy Char*? data group repeatedly repartition a long whitespace tail when the required closing ?> is absent. Both parsePI and parseProcessingInstruction apply the expression to the entire remaining source, causing quadratic backtracking during DOMParser.parseFromString() under default options and allowing a small unauthenticated XML input to stall the Node.js event loop. This issue is fixed in @xmldom/xmldom version 0.9.11.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.7

Product Status

Vendor xmldom
Product xmldom
Versions
  • Version >= 0.9.0-beta.9, < 0.9.11 is affected
Vendor @xmldom
Product xmldom
Versions
  • Version >= 0.9.0-beta.9, < 0.9.11 is affected

References

Problem Types

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