CVE-2026-85999

NameCVE-2026-85999
DescriptionSoup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.9, selector_iter in src/soupsieve/css_parser.py trims the raw selector with RE_WS_END, an end-anchored WSC whitespace-and-comment expression used with search(), so the regular expression engine retries a greedy scan at every starting offset. An attacker-controlled valid selector containing a long internal whitespace run, or a selector containing a long CSS comment run followed by another token, causes quadratic CPU work before tokenization. User-controlled selectors can reach the path through soupsieve.compile() and BeautifulSoup.select(), while applications using only hard-coded selectors are unaffected. This root cause is separate from the IDENTIFIER and VALUE backtracking vulnerability because the cost occurs in RE_WS_END.search during trimming rather than token matching. The resulting CPU consumption can hold the Python GIL, exhaust workers, and stall a service without causing memory corruption or code execution. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
soupsieve (PTS)bookworm2.3.2-1vulnerable
trixie2.7-1vulnerable
forky, sid2.8.4-1vulnerable

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
soupsievesource(unstable)(unfixed)

Notes

https://github.com/facelessuser/soupsieve/security/advisories/GHSA-j934-xhv5-fg8f
Fixed by: https://github.com/facelessuser/soupsieve/commit/cf198fcddc9230f06ed39f974eba0ce076b85cda (2.9)

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