CVE-2026-59168: Dasel: Unbounded recursion in JSON and XML readers causes unrecoverable stack-overflow DoS

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-59168 is a medium (CVSS 6.2) Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in tomwright dasel. EPSS estimates a 0.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 2.6% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 21-09-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 21-09-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Dasel is a command-line tool and library for querying, modifying, and transforming data structures. From 3.0.0 until 3.11.1, parsing/json/json_reader.go decodeValue, decodeObject, and decodeArray, and parsing/xml/reader.go parseElement, recurse once per input nesting level without a depth guard. Deeply nested attacker-controlled JSON or XML supplied through parsing.Format(...).NewReader(...).Read(data), the command-line interface, or the parse selector function can exhaust the Go goroutine stack and raise an unrecoverable fatal error that terminates the entire process. The XML input-size limit does not prevent depth exhaustion, and defer or recover cannot intercept the failure. This issue is fixed in version 3.11.1.

• CWE-674Uncontrolled RecursionThe product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.