FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

expat2 -- Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

Affected packages
expat2 < 2.8.4

Details

VuXML ID 88917664-a65c-11f1-a49c-00a0980083d7
Discovery 2026-08-18
Entry 2026-09-01

https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/pull/1321 reports:

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.

References

CVE Name CVE-2026-66046
URL https://cveawg.mitre.org/api/cve/CVE-2026-66046