CVE-2026-104844

PostCSS: Quadratic complexity in flat selector parsing allows CPU exhaustion

State
Published
Severity
5.9 Medium
Published
Oct 2, 2026
Updated
Oct 2, 2026
Reserved
Oct 2, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

PostCSS Selector Parser is a CSS selector parser that integrates with PostCSS but does not require it. Prior to 7.1.6, src/parser.js splitWord() can receive a flat selector as one word token carrying many class or ID indexes because period and hash characters are not tokenizer word delimiters. The uniqs() deduplication and per-index class and ID membership checks repeatedly scan the class and ID index arrays, while a separate Sass-interpolation filtering pass also performs repeated linear scanning. Together, these passes make parsing quadratic in the number of indexes and allow a crafted selector to occupy a synchronous parser thread. The maxNestingDepth guard does not mitigate the issue because the hostile selector can have zero nesting depth. Only consumers that synchronously parse untrusted selectors in an exposed request path are affected; ordinary build-time parsing of trusted sources is not affected. This issue is fixed in version 7.1.6.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.15.9 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

Affected Products

ProductVersions
postcss-selector-parserpostcss
  • < 7.1.6Affected

References

Every record here comes from the CVE Program’s CVE List. © 1999–2026 The MITRE Corporation. CVE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. The records are reproduced under the CVE Program terms of use.