CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-14741

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.35%

28th percentile - higher than 28% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability in HTTP::Date for Perl before version 6.08 causes CPU exhaustion via polynomial regex backtracking in the parse_date function. An attacker can send a crafted date header that forces quadratic computational complexity, leading to prolonged CPU consumption.

Risk Assessment

The organization is at risk of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, where a single HTTP request with a malicious date header can cause significant slowdown or unavailability of services processing such headers.

Recommendation

Immediately update the HTTP::Date library to version 6.08 or later, which includes a fix that removes the problematic regular expressions.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

HTTP::Date versions before 6.08 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via polynomial regex backtracking in parse_date. parse_date() matches the date string against a chain of alternative regexes, and str2time() delegates to it. Several of these patterns place unbounded quantifiers next to each other before a trailing `\s*$` anchor. A valid date prefix followed by a long interior run of digits, letters, or whitespace and a single trailing byte that defeats the final match forces the engine to repartition the run, giving polynomial (about quadratic) backtracking. A header value of a few tens of kilobytes runs for tens of seconds of CPU. HTTP::Date parses timestamps such as HTTP `Date`, `Expires`, and `Last-Modified` headers, which commonly originate from untrusted sources. Any caller that passes an untrusted date header to str2time() or parse_date() can be driven to consume unbounded CPU, a denial of service.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS