CyberSecBulletin

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

CWE-1333

The product uses a regular expression with a worst-case computational complexity that is inefficient and possibly exponential.

We track 263 vulnerabilities of this type. 100% are rated high or critical, and the average CVSS score is 7.6.

How this weakness is prevented

  • Architecture and Design: Use regular expressions that do not support backtracking, e.g. by removing nested quantifiers.
  • System Configuration: Set backtracking limits in the configuration of the regular expression implementation, such as PHP's pcre.backtrack_limit. Also consider limits on execution time for the process.
  • Implementation: Do not use regular expressions with untrusted input. If regular expressions must be used, avoid using backtracking in the expression.
  • Implementation: Limit the length of the input that the regular expression will process.

Latest Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerabilities

  • 7.5 High severity

    joi: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-92599Hapijs

    joi (npm package `joi`, hapi.js) versions >=17.2.0 <17.13.7 and >=18.0.0 <18.2.6 are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service in the `Joi.string().isoDate()` validation rule. One of the regular expressions the rule applies to the input is unanchored,

  • 7.1 High severity

    opencti: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-76821OpenCTI-Platform

    OpenCTI is an open source platform for managing cyber threat intelligence knowledge and observables. Prior to 7.260706.0, the JSON ingestion mapper's extractWithRegexp formula function compiled a user-supplied regular expression with the JavaScript RegExp engi

  • 8.2 High severity

    dotvvm: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-57577Riganti

    DotVVM is an open source MVVM framework for web applications. Prior to 4.2.11, 4.3.15, and 5.0.0-preview09-final, a route containing multiple unconstrained parameters in one path segment can cause excessive regular-expression backtracking in DotvvmRoute.IsMatc

  • 9.8 Critical severity

    Apache OpenNLP: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-82617Apache

    The two built-in name-finder patterns exposed by opennlp.tools.namefind.RegexNameFinderFactory - DEFAULT_REGEX_NAME_FINDER.EMAIL and DEFAULT_REGEX_NAME_FINDER.URL - contain ambiguous nested quantifiers. An application that obtains these finders through RegexNa

  • 7.5 High severity

    jackson-databind: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-68497FasterXML

    jackson-databind binds a JSON string to a javax.xml.datatype.Duration or javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar field by passing the raw string verbatim to DatatypeFactory.newDuration(value) or newXMLGregorianCalendar(value) in CoreXMLDeserializers.Std._deser

  • 7.5 High severity

    GitPython: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-87819Gitpython-developers

    GitPython before 3.1.60 contains a regular expression denial of service vulnerability in Actor.name_email_regex that processes commit author and committer fields. Attackers can craft a commit object with a malformed author field containing an unterminated angl

  • 7.1 High severity

    n8n: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-86081n8n

    n8n is an open source workflow automation platform. Prior to 1.123.76, 2.37.7, and 2.38.2, the Git node clone operation matched an attacker-controlled destination path against the default N8N_BLOCK_FILE_PATTERNS regular expression. The pattern ^(./).git(/.)$ a

  • 7.5 High severity

    Thunderbird: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-84642Mozilla

    The values of the mail.allowed_attachment_hostnames advanced config setting were used in a regular expression without escaping. For some possible valid hostnames, this could allow certain unintended hostnames to also match and serve remote attachments. This vu

  • 8.7 High severity

    xmldom: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-83619Xmldom

    xmldom is a pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module. From 0.7.0 until 0.8.15, the release-0.8.x parser in lib/sax.js trims captured end-tag names with the unanchored global expression /[ \t\n\r]+$/g. For an

  • 8.7 High severity

    xmldom: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-83606Xmldom

    xmldom is a pure JavaScript W3C standard-based (XML DOM Level 2 Core) DOMParser and XMLSerializer module. From 0.9.0-beta.9 until 0.9.11, the processing-instruction production in lib/grammar.js lets the greedy S+ separator and lazy Char*? data group repeatedly

  • 7.1 High severity

    protego: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-55520Scrapy

    Protego is a pure-Python robots.txt parser with support for modern conventions. Prior to 0.6.2, protego._urlpattern._URLPattern._prepare_pattern_for_regex translates every asterisk in an Allow or Disallow directive into a lazy regular-expression wildcard, so a

  • 7.5 High severity

    nltk: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-80205Nltk

    NLTK versions before 3.10.0 contain a regular expression denial of service vulnerability in Text.findall() and TokenSearcher.findall() methods that accept user-supplied regular expressions without validation or timeout. Attackers can supply crafted regex patte

  • 7.5 High severity

    nokogiri: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-79770Sparklemotion

    Nokogiri versions before 1.19.3 contain regular expression denial of service vulnerabilities in the CSS selector tokenizer affecting string-literal and identifier tokenization. Attackers can inject adversarial CSS selectors into methods like Node#css, Node#at_

  • 7.5 High severity

    SAP S/4HANA (Manage Supply Protection): Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-66766SAP

    SAP S/4HANA (Private Cloud) uses a third-party component that contains a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability. An unauthenticated attacker could supply specially crafted input that triggers excessive processing within the affected functio

  • 7.5 High severity

    nltk: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-72818Nltk

    The URLS regular expression in nltk/tokenize/casual.py, compiled into TweetTokenizer.WORD_RE and applied by TweetTokenizer.tokenize, contains a naked-domain branch whose domain-label prefix [a-z0-9]+(?:[.\-][a-z0-9]+)* is unbounded. Input consisting of many al

  • 7.5 High severity

    logto: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-62317Logto-io

    Logto is the modern, open-source auth infrastructure for SaaS and AI apps. Prior to 1.41.0, Logto's email subaddressing blocklist in packages/core/src/libraries/sign-in-experience/email-blocklist-policy.ts used the attacker-controlled domain from email input t

  • 7.5 High severity

    sqlparse: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-59893Andialbrecht

    sqlparse is a non-validating SQL parser module for Python. Prior to 0.6.0, SQL_REGEX in sqlparse/keywords.py and the per-position loop in sqlparse/lexer.py repeatedly scan unmatched dollar-quoted literal and multiline-comment delimiters, causing quadratic CPU

  • 8.7 High severity

    sqlparse: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

    CVE-2026-54284Andialbrecht

    sqlparse is a non-validating SQL parser module for Python. Prior to 0.6.0, TokenList construction and string conversion in sqlparse/sql.py repeatedly flatten nested token subtrees constructed by group_parenthesis and group_case, causing quadratic CPU consumpti

  • 7.5 High severity

    pymdown-extensions: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-67422Facelessuser

    pymdown-extensions is a collection of extensions for the Python Markdown library. In versions up to and including 11.0, four inline processors (caret, tilde, betterem, and magiclink) use regular expressions whose content groups can partition a run of delimiter

  • 7.5 High severity

    html_sanitize_ex: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-68749Rrrene

    Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability in the CSS scrubber in rrrene html_sanitize_ex allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust server CPU via a long CSS declaration in sanitized HTML. The declaration regex in HtmlSanitizeEx.Scrubbe

  • 8.7 High severity

    Swift: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-71190OpenStack

    In OpenStack Swift through 2.38.0, the proxy server Accept header parser contains a regular expression vulnerable to catastrophic backtracking (ReDoS). The "qdtext" pattern (?:[^"]|\\.)* allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to send a crafted Accept header

  • 7.5 High severity

    org.hl7.fhir.core: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-49485Hapifhir

    HAPI FHIR is a complete implementation of the HL7 FHIR standard for healthcare interoperability in Java. Prior to 6.9.9 and 6.9.4.2, all implementations of FHIRPathEngine accept arbitrary FHIRPath expressions and evaluate them without input validation, and the

  • 7.5 High severity

    jsonata: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-52746Jsonata-js

    JSONata is a JSON query and transformation language. Prior to 2.2.0 and 1.8.9, malicious non-matching inputs to the $toMillis function can cause superlinear backtracking in the ISO-8601 validation regex, leading to denial of service in applications that evalua

  • 7.5 High severity

    HTTP::Date: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-14741Oalders

    HTTP::Date versions before 6.08 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via polynomial regex backtracking in parse_date. parse_date() matches the date string against a chain of alternative regexes, and str2time() delegates to it. Several of these patterns place unbounde

  • 7.5 High severity

    org.hl7.fhir.core: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-45367Hapifhir

    HAPI FHIR is a complete implementation of the HL7 FHIR standard for healthcare interoperability in Java. Prior to 6.9.7, the FHIRPathEngine implementation passes user-controlled regular expressions from matches(), matchesFull(), and replaceMatches() to Java re

  • 7.5 High severity

    soupsieve: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-49477Facelessuser

    Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.8.4, the CSS selector parser in soupsieve contains a regular expression vulnerable to catastrophic backtracking when processing an attribute selector with an unterminate

  • 7.5 High severity

    linkify-it: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-48801Markdown-it

    linkify-it is a links recognition library with full Unicode support. Prior to 5.0.1, LinkifyIt.prototype.match, the package's primary public API, has O(N²) algorithmic complexity for inputs containing many fuzzy links or emails because the JavaScript-level sca

  • 7.5 High severity

    symfony: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-45305Symfony

    Symfony is a PHP framework for web and console applications and a set of reusable PHP components. Prior to 5.4.52, 6.4.40, 7.4.12, and 8.0.12, Symfony\Component\Yaml\Parser::cleanup() used regular expressions with overlapping quantifiers for YAML directive, co

  • 7.5 High severity

    symfony: Uncontrolled Recursion

    CVE-2026-45133Symfony

    Symfony is a PHP framework for web and console applications and a set of reusable PHP components. Prior to 5.4.52, 6.4.40, 7.4.12, and 8.0.12, when the parser is exposed to attacker-controlled input, deeply nested mappings or sequences cause both the block-lev

  • 7.5 High severity

    symfony: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-45756Symfony

    Symfony is a PHP framework for web and console applications and a set of reusable PHP components. From 7.3.0-BETA1 until 7.4.12 and 8.0.12, the JsonPath component compiles attacker-controlled match() and search() filter patterns directly into preg_match() with

  • 8.7 High severity

    cphalcon: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-57584Phalcon

    Phalcon is a high-performance, full-stack PHP framework. Prior to 5.15.0, every Phalcon MVC application built with a default router registers a built-in route whose compiled PCRE pattern contains the nested quantifier (/.), and the same construct is produced b

  • 7.5 High severity

    org.hl7.fhir.core: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-55470Hapifhir

    HAPI FHIR is a complete implementation of the HL7 FHIR standard for healthcare interoperability in Java. Prior to 6.9.10, the fix for CVE-2026-45367 incompletely patched the DSTU2 module, leaving FHIRPathEngine.matches() in org.hl7.fhir.dstu2/utils/FHIRPathEng

  • 7.5 High severity

    mistune: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

    CVE-2026-59928Lepture

    Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.3.0, a Markdown document containing many repeated or distinct reference-link definitions causes quadratic work in src/mistune/block_parser.py and the ref_links environment dictionary ha

  • 7.5 High severity

    mistune: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

    CVE-2026-59925Lepture

    Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.3.0, long sequences of well-formed double-asterisk or triple-asterisk emphasis pairs around a character cause quadratic work in src/mistune/inline_parser.py because the parser scans for

  • 7.5 High severity

    mistune: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

    CVE-2026-59922Lepture

    Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.3.0, a run of closed tilde, equals-sign, or caret marker pairs around a character causes quadratic work in src/mistune/plugins/formatting.py when the strikethrough, mark, or insert plug

  • 7.5 High severity

    String::Util: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-14895BAKERSCOT

    String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service. The trim and rtrim functions stripped trailing whitespace with s/\s*$//u. Because \s* matches greedily and the $ anchor fails whenever a non-whitespace charac

  • 7.5 High severity

    vllm: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-55574Vllm-project

    vLLM is a high-throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving engine for LLMs. Prior to 0.24.0, the structured_outputs.regex API parameter passes a user-supplied regular expression string directly to the grammar compiler backends with no compilation tim

  • 7.5 High severity

    sentry: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

    CVE-2026-52794Getsentry

    Sentry is an error tracking and performance monitoring tool. From 24.4.0 until 26.5.2, a Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability exists in Sentry's event ingestion pipeline, where a regex applied to attacker-controlled fields on incoming eve

  • 7.5 High severity

    mistune: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-49851Lepture

    Mistune is a Python Markdown parser with renderers and plugins. Prior to 3.3.0, Mistune is vulnerable to a CPU exhaustion DoS due to superlinear (approximately O(n²)) behavior in parse_link_text. When parsing Markdown containing many consecutive [ characters,

  • 7.5 High severity

    angular: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

    CVE-2026-54268Angular

    Angular is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications using TypeScript/JavaScript and other languages. Prior to 22.0.1, 21.2.17, and 20.3.25, a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists in the @angular/common package of the Angu