CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-66046
8.7 HIGH
Official page ↗
- Status
- Analyzed
- Published
- 2026-08-18
- Last modified
- 2026-10-22
- Assigner
- [email protected]
- CVSS 4.0 ([email protected])
- 8.7 HIGH — 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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 7.5 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-407
Description
Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c, where processing N specified attributes with non-normalized values triggers an O(N^2) linear scan of elementType->defaultAtts to determine CDATA status. A remote unauthenticated attacker can supply a single well-formed XML document of a few megabytes to an application parsing untrusted XML to cause excessive CPU consumption, resulting in denial of service without requiring authentication, external entity resolution, or non-default parser options.
Affected configurations
• libexpat project libexpat (<= 2.8.3)
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity weakness
References
- https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/pull/1321 Exploit, Patch, Vendor Advisory
- https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/expat-denial-of-service-via-storeatts-quadratic-complexity Exploit, Patch, Third Party Advisory