CVE-2026-104844: PostCSS: Quadratic complexity in flat selector parsing allows CPU exhaustion

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-104844 is a medium (CVSS 5.9) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in postcss postcss-selector-parser. EPSS estimates a 0.39% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 33% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 02-10-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 02-10-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

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.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
• CWE-407Inefficient Algorithmic ComplexityAn algorithm in a product has an inefficient worst-case computational complexity that may be detrimental to system performance and can be triggered by an attacker, typically using crafted manipulations that ensure that the worst case is being reached.