CVE-2026-66046

Published Aug 18, 2026

Last updated a month ago

Overview

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.
Source
disclosure@vulncheck.com
NVD status
Analyzed
Products
libexpat

Risk scores

CVSS 4.0

Type
Secondary
Base score
8.7
Impact score
-
Exploitability score
-
Vector string
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
Severity
HIGH

CVSS 3.1

Type
Secondary
Base score
7.5
Impact score
3.6
Exploitability score
3.9
Vector string
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Severity
HIGH

Weaknesses

disclosure@vulncheck.com
CWE-407

Social media

Hype score
Not currently trending

Configurations