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NVD HIGH: CVE-2026-66046 — Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadrat...

·Source: NIST NVD

Updated:

Executive 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

Analysis

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. CVSS Score: 7.5. Published: 2026-08-18T15:16:57.000.

Indicators of Compromise (1)

CVE (1)
CVE-2026-66046
NVDMITRE CVE
Source Attribution

Originally published by NIST NVD on Aug 18, 2026. Verified by: NIST.

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