CVE-2026-86000 PUBLISHED

Soup Sieve: Polynomial-time ReDoS (O(n²)) in the `IDENTIFIER` / `VALUE` selector sub-patterns

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 04.09.2026 Published: 17.09.2026 Updated: 17.09.2026

Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.9, the selector parser in src/soupsieve/css_parser.py defines IDENTIFIER with adjacent quantified groups over overlapping character classes, and VALUE embeds IDENTIFIER for attribute selectors. When an attacker-controlled selector contains a long identifier or unquoted attribute-value run followed by input that makes the overall match fail, the regular expression engine explores quadratically many splits between the overlapping groups. User-controlled selectors can reach this path through soupsieve.compile(), soupsieve.select(), or BeautifulSoup.select(), while applications using only hard-coded selectors are unaffected. The resulting CPU consumption can hold the Python GIL, exhaust application workers, and stall a service; successful plain identifier matches are linear, and the issue does not cause memory corruption or code execution. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS Score: 5.3

Product Status

Vendor facelessuser
Product soupsieve
Versions
  • Version < 2.9 is affected

References

Problem Types

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