CVE-2026-85999
CVE-2026-85999 updated by NVD
Summary
Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.9, selector_iter in src/soupsieve/css_parser.py trims the raw selector with RE_WS_END, an end-anchored WSC whitespace-and-comment expression used with search(), so the regular expression engine retries a greedy scan at every starting offset. An attacker-controlled valid selector containing a long internal whitespace run, or a selector containing a long CSS comment run followed by another token, causes quadratic CPU work before tokenization. User-controlled selectors can reach the path through soupsieve.compile() and BeautifulSoup.select(), while applications using only hard-coded selectors are unaffected. This root cause is separate from the IDENTIFIER and VALUE backtracking vulnerability because the cost occurs in RE_WS_END.search during trimming rather than token matching. The resulting CPU consumption can hold the Python GIL, exhaust workers, and stall a service without causing memory corruption or code execution. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected versions | Fixed versions |
|---|---|---|---|
| PyPI | soupsieve | — | 2.9.0 |
Remediation: Upgrade to 2.9.0 or later.
References
Includes data from the GitHub Advisory Database, licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Includes data from the National Vulnerability Database (NIST). NVD data is in the public domain; this page is not endorsed by NIST.
CVE® is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. CVE content reproduced under the CVE Terms of Use; copyright designation © MITRE.
EPSS scores provided by the FIRST.org Exploit Prediction Scoring System.