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PostCSS: Quadratic complexity in flat selector parsing allows CPU exhaustion

Type: advisorySource: Official CVE List1 source record

PostCSS Selector Parser is a CSS selector parser that integrates with PostCSS but does not require it. Prior to 7.1.6, src/parser.js splitWord() can receive a flat selector as one word token carrying many class or ID indexes because period and hash characters are not tokenizer word delimiters. The uniqs() deduplication and per-index class and ID membership checks repeatedly scan the class and ID index arrays, while a separate Sass-interpolation filtering pass also performs repeated linear scanning. Together, these passes make parsing quadratic in the number of indexes and allow a crafted selector to occupy a synchronous parser thread. The maxNestingDepth guard does not mitigate the issue because the hostile selector can have zero nesting depth. Only consumers that synchronously parse untrusted selectors in an exposed request path are affected; ordinary build-time parsing of trusted sources is not affected. This issue is fixed in version 7.1.6.

Announced Source revision 1
Original source ↗

CVE-2026-104844

Primary source · Revision 1

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-2026-104844

postcss-selector-parser

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

Structured affected-version data

Original package identities and version rules from this source.

[
  {
    "vendor": "postcss",
    "product": "postcss-selector-parser",
    "versions": [
      {
        "status": "affected",
        "version": "< 7.1.6"
      }
    ]
  }
]
Related CVEs
CVE-2026-104844

Source reference: /cveMetadata/cveId

Publisher severity

medium

Source reference: /containers/cna/metrics

Event
#8022 · Revision 1
Added to Heist Feed
Publisher date
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