CVE-2026-87079 PUBLISHED

Net::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic insertion cost when decoding a long label in decode_punycode

Assigner: CPANSec
Reserved: 08.09.2026 Published: 22.09.2026 Updated: 22.09.2026

Net::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic insertion cost when decoding a long label in decode_punycode.

The XS backend inserts each decoded code point into a UTF-8 buffer and finds the insertion point by scanning that buffer from the start, one character at a time. The scan runs once per code point over the output built so far, so the cost is quadratic in the label length. The pure-Perl backend downgrades its input to bytes so that substr can index it directly, but takes its working copy before the downgrade, so when the input carries the UTF-8 flag every substr on the copy scans from the start, with the same quadratic cost.

Nothing bounds the label length in the to-Unicode direction. The 63-byte DNS limit is checked only when converting to ASCII, so domain_to_unicode and uts46_to_unicode pass an attacker-supplied label of any length to the decoder.

Product Status

Package Collection https://cpan.org/modules
Package Name Net-IDN-Encode
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 2.590 (excl.)

Solutions

Upgrade to Net-IDN-Encode 2.590-TRIAL or later.

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity CWE