CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-68749

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.44%

37th percentile - higher than 37% of all known CVEs

Summary

An Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability in the CSS scrubber in html_sanitize_ex allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust server CPU via a long CSS declaration in sanitized HTML. The regex in CSS.scrub/1 has quadratic complexity for long strings, leading to CPU exhaustion.

Risk Assessment

The risk is a potential DoS attack that can saturate the BEAM scheduler pool and make the application unresponsive, disrupting service availability.

Recommendation

Update html_sanitize_ex to version 1.4.5 or 1.5.3 (depending on the branch) which include a fix for the regex complexity issue.

Other vulnerabilities in html_sanitize_ex

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

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 <style> 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.

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