Expat Denial of Service via storeAtts() Quadratic Complexity
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.
Evidence and details
Imported from structured advisory data. Source references identify upstream records or fields; verify affected versions and your deployed configuration.
Security context
Source reference: cve:CVE-2026-66046
libexpat
Source reference: /containers/cna/affected/0/product
- Affected versions
- Not stated in this record
- Fixed versions
- Not stated in this record
- Prerequisites
- Not stated in this record
- Related CVEs
- CVE-2026-66046
Source reference:
/cveMetadata/cveId
Publisher severity
high
Source reference: /containers/cna/metrics