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.
Metrics
Affected Vendors & Products
Advisories
No advisories yet.
Fixes
Solution
No solution given by the vendor.
Workaround
No workaround given by the vendor.
References
History
Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:15:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| First Time appeared |
Libexpat Project
Libexpat Project libexpat |
|
| Vendors & Products |
Libexpat Project
Libexpat Project libexpat |
Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:30:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | |
| Title | Expat Denial of Service via storeAtts() Quadratic Complexity | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-407 | |
| References |
| |
| Metrics |
cvssV3_1
|
Projects
Sign in to view the affected projects.
Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: VulnCheck
Published:
Updated: 2026-08-18T14:10:05.176Z
Reserved: 2026-07-23T20:45:17.817Z
Link: CVE-2026-66046
No data.
Status : Received
Published: 2026-08-18T15:16:57.000
Modified: 2026-08-18T15:16:57.000
Link: CVE-2026-66046
No data.
OpenCVE Enrichment
Updated: 2026-08-18T16:15:04Z
Weaknesses