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.
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History

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'yes', 'Exploitation': 'poc', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


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, 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.
Title Soup Sieve: Polynomial-time ReDoS (O(n²)) in the `IDENTIFIER` / `VALUE` selector sub-patterns
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'}


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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published:

Updated: 2026-09-17T15:45:49.251Z

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

Link: CVE-2026-86000

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2026-09-17T15:45:42.742Z

cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-09-17T16:18:16.757

Modified: 2026-09-17T16:18:16.757

Link: CVE-2026-86000

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.

Weaknesses