GitHub Advisoryadvisory · npm
GHSA-rj75-hqrm-r3gf PostCSS: Quadratic complexity in flat selector parsing allows CPU exhaustion
MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-104844
- Ecosystem
- npm
- Packages
- postcss-selector-parser
- Severity
- Moderate
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400, CWE-407
- Reviewed
- 2026-10-05
Affected packages
• npm postcss-selector-parser: >= 7.0.0, < 7.1.6 → fixed in 7.1.6
• npm postcss-selector-parser: < 6.1.5 → fixed in 6.1.5
Description
Impact
`.` and `#` are not word delimiters in the tokenizer, so a flat selector such as
`.a.a.a...` reaches `splitWord()` as a single word token carrying n class or id
indexes. Three passes scanned those index arrays linearly for every index,
making the parse O(n^2) in the number of indexes rather than in input length:
`uniqs()`, the `indices.forEach` loop, and the Sass-interpolation filter.
Parsing a 400 KB flat selector took ~34 s on a modern laptop, fully occupying a
single thread. A benign selector of identical byte size parses in tens of
milliseconds, so the cost is driven by the index count, not the input size.
The nesting depth of such a selector is 0, so the `maxNestingDepth` guard added
in 7.1.3 offers no protection.
Reachability is deployment dependent. Only consumers that parse untrusted,
attacker-supplied selectors synchronously in a request path are exposed, for
example CSS sanitizers, CSS-in-JS services and online playgrounds. Ordinary
build-time use on trusted sources is not affected.
Patches
Fixed in 7.1.6. The three passes now use Set membership tests, making parsing
linear in the number of indexes. There is no behaviour change: parsing is
byte-identical on a differential corpus of 8413 selectors.
Workarounds
Cap the size of selectors accepted from untrusted sources before parsing.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-104844 PostCSS Selector Parser is a CSS selector parser that integrates with PostCSS but does not require it. vulnerability
References
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser/security/advisories/GHSA-rj75-hqrm-r3gf web
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-104844 advisory
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser/pull/346 web
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser/commit/62b191792df0a0bc56062e5a875bc74aae2a51cd web
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser/commit/70b0779c843462197380d25daa02d1528bf7eae5 web
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser package
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser/releases/tag/6.1.5 web
- https://github.com/postcss/postcss-selector-parser/releases/tag/7.1.6 web