CVE-2026-66046

High

Description

Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c, where processing N specified attributes with non-normalized values triggers an O(N^2) linear scan of elementType->defaultAtts to determine CDATA status. A remote unauthenticated attacker can supply a single well-formed XML document of a few megabytes to an application parsing untrusted XML to cause excessive CPU consumption, resulting in denial of service without requiring authentication, external entity resolution, or non-default parser options.

SeverityHigh
CVSS7.5
Exploit probability—
ProductLibexpat
PublishedAug 18, 2026
First seenAug 18, 2026
Weakness typeCWE-407CWE-407

How to fix

Sources list no fixed version or patch link for this vulnerability.

Affected products

ProductAffected versionsFixed in
libexpat_project libexpatv ≤ 2.8.3—

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