CVE-2026-116268

MIME::Field::ParamVal versions before 5.521 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via unclosed comments in header parameters.

The comment pattern used to parse Content-Type and Content-Disposition parameters scans from each "(" to the next ")". In a field with no ")", every "(" scans to the end of the header and fails, so parsing takes time quadratic in the header length. The field is parsed again on each attribute lookup, several times per MIME entity.

A 40 KB header takes about 7 seconds to parse once.