CVE-2026-86000
Soup Sieve: Polynomial-time ReDoS (O(n²)) in the `IDENTIFIER` / `VALUE` selector sub-patterns
Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.9, the selector parser in src/soupsieve/css_parser.py defines IDENTIFIER with adjacent quantified groups over overlapping character classes, and VALUE embeds IDENTIFIER for attribute selectors. When an attacker-controlled selector contains a long identifier or unquoted attribute-value run followed by input that makes the overall match fail, the regular expression engine explores quadratically many splits between the overlapping groups. User-controlled selectors can reach this path through soupsieve.compile(), soupsieve.select(), or BeautifulSoup.select(), while applications using only hard-coded selectors are unaffected. The resulting CPU consumption can hold the Python GIL, exhaust application workers, and stall a service; successful plain identifier matches are linear, and the issue does not cause memory corruption or code execution. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.
- Affected
- facelessuser · soupsieve
- CVSS v3.1 GITHUB
- 5.3 MEDIUM
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L - EPSS
- 0.61% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, 48th percentile
- Published
- 2026-09-17