GHSA-m3rp-25vq-jfcvHighCVSS 7.5

Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic...

Published
August 18, 2026
Last Modified
August 18, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 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.

🔗 References (4)