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CVE-2026-66046 (GCVE-0-2026-66046)

Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-08-18 14:10 – Updated: 2026-08-21 11:20 X_Open Source
VLAI
Title
Expat Denial of Service via storeAtts() Quadratic Complexity
Summary
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.
Severity
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
7.5 (High)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
SSVC
Exploitation: none Automatable: yes Technical Impact: partial
CISA Coordinator · CISA-ADP (v2.0.3)
Decision recorded 2026-08-20 13:48 UTC
CWE
  • CWE-407 - Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
Assigner
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version CPE status
libexpat project libexpat Affected: 0 , ≤ 2.8.3 (semver)
guessed Create a notification for this product.
Date Public
2026-08-13 00:00
Credits
Fabian Wahle (Hap Security) Sebastian Pipping VulnCheck
Show details on NVD website
To clipboard 

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Forecast uses a logistic model when the trend is rising, or an exponential decay model when the trend is falling. Fitted via linearized least squares.

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  • Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
  • Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
  • Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
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  • Patched: The vulnerability was observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
  • Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
  • Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
  • Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.


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