Soup 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.
Advisories
Source ID Title
Github GHSA Github GHSA GHSA-j934-xhv5-fg8f Soup Sieve: Polynomial-time ReDoS (O(n²)) in the whitespace/comment trimming regex `RE_WS_END` (triggers on VALID selectors)
Fixes

Solution

No solution given by the vendor.


Workaround

No workaround given by the vendor.

History

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
References
Metrics threat_severity

None

threat_severity

Important


Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Facelessuser
Facelessuser soupsieve
Vendors & Products Facelessuser
Facelessuser soupsieve

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Soup 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.
Title Soup Sieve: Polynomial-time ReDoS (O(n²)) in the whitespace/comment trimming regex `RE_WS_END` (triggers on VALID selectors)
Weaknesses CWE-1333
CWE-400
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 5.3, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L'}


Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published:

Updated: 2026-09-17T15:23:37.457Z

Reserved: 2026-09-04T19:17:36.246Z

Link: CVE-2026-85999

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-09-17T16:18:16.590

Modified: 2026-09-17T16:18:16.590

Link: CVE-2026-85999

cve-icon Redhat

Severity : Important

Publid Date: 2026-09-17T15:23:37Z

Links: CVE-2026-85999 - Bugzilla

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

Updated: 2026-09-17T20:30:17Z

Weaknesses