CVE-2026-68749
Description
Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability in the CSS scrubber in rrrene html_sanitize_ex allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust server CPU via a long CSS declaration in sanitized HTML. The declaration regex in HtmlSanitizeEx.Scrubber.CSS.scrub/1 matches the property name with an unbounded greedy [-\w]+ followed by a mandatory :, so a long run of word characters not followed by a colon makes the engine give back one character at a time and retry the colon at every start offset. The work is quadratic in the length of the run, and no length cap is applied to the CSS handed to the scrubber. An 80 KB body costs roughly 2.4 seconds of scheduler time, so a few concurrent requests saturate the BEAM scheduler pool and make the application unresponsive.
The impact is CPU exhaustion only. Nothing is read, modified or disclosed.
This issue affects html_sanitize_ex: from 0.3.1 before 1.4.5 and from 1.5.0-rc.0 before 1.5.3.
AI Insight
LLM-synthesized narrative grounded in this CVE's description and references.
Affected products
2cpe:2.3:a:rrrene:htmlsanitizeex:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*+ 1 more
- cpe:2.3:a:rrrene:htmlsanitizeex:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*range: >=0.3.1,<1.5.3
- (no CPE)range: from 0.3.1 before 1.4.5 and from 1.5.0-rc.0 before 1.5.3
Patches
Vulnerability mechanics
References
5- cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-68749.htmlnvdPatchThird Party Advisory
- github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/commit/4f4bd9eb254881462c0461fbab74b29188c2c133nvdPatch
- osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-68749nvdPatchThird Party Advisory
- github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/security/advisories/GHSA-4cx2-987x-rr2xnvdBroken Link
- github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/commit/b673df33ddf982c8bd0a8bd6348aa247080b3b14nvd
News mentions
0No linked articles in our index yet.