CVE-2026-86000: Soup Sieve: Polynomial-time ReDoS (O(n²)) in the `IDENTIFIER` / `VALUE` selector sub-patterns

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-86000 is a medium (CVSS 5.3) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in facelessuser soupsieve. EPSS estimates a 0.61% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 49.2% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 17-09-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 17-09-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.9, the selector parser in src/soupsieve/css_parser.py defines IDENTIFIER with adjacent quantified groups over overlapping character classes, and VALUE embeds IDENTIFIER for attribute selectors. When an attacker-controlled selector contains a long identifier or unquoted attribute-value run followed by input that makes the overall match fail, the regular expression engine explores quadratically many splits between the overlapping groups. User-controlled selectors can reach this path through soupsieve.compile(), soupsieve.select(), or BeautifulSoup.select(), while applications using only hard-coded selectors are unaffected. The resulting CPU consumption can hold the Python GIL, exhaust application workers, and stall a service; successful plain identifier matches are linear, and the issue does not cause memory corruption or code execution. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
• CWE-1333Inefficient Regular Expression ComplexityThe product uses a regular expression with a worst-case computational complexity that is inefficient and possibly exponential.