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VulnerabilityPublished Updated

CVE-2026-104844: PostCSS · Quadratic complexity in flat selector parsing allows CPU exhaustion

Affects postcss-selector-parserSource GCVE Database

0
Authoritative record:CVE-2026-104844· Medium 5.9

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 5.9 Medium : upgrade to 7.1.6 when convenient.

Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 17:16 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score
5.9Medium
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
EPSS
0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 32% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch
Available – fixed in 7.1.6, 6.1.5
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 2 Oct 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponised: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.

What to do

Upgrade postcss-selector-parser to 7.1.6; postcss-selector-parser to 6.1.5.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
npmpostcss-selector-parserAffected
  • >=7.0.0 <7.1.6
Fixed in
  • 7.1.6
npmpostcss-selector-parserAffected
  • <6.1.5
Fixed in
  • 6.1.5

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

Description

### Impact `.` and `#` are not word delimiters in the tokenizer, so a flat selector such as `.a.a.a...` reaches `splitWord()` as a single word token carrying n class or id indexes. Three passes scanned those index arrays linearly for every index, making the parse O(n^2) in the number of indexes rather than in input length: `uniqs()`, the `indices.forEach` loop, and the Sass-interpolation filter. Parsing a 400 KB flat selector took ~34 s on a modern laptop, fully occupying a single thread. A benign selector of identical byte size parses in tens of milliseconds, so the cost is driven by the index count, not the input size. The nesting depth of such a selector is 0, so the `maxNestingDepth` guard added in 7.1.3 offers no protection. Reachability is deployment dependent. Only consumers that parse untrusted, attacker-supplied selectors synchronously in a request path are exposed, for example CSS sanitizers, CSS-in-JS services and online playgrounds. Ordinary build-time use on trusted sources is not affected. ### Patches Fixed in 7.1.6. The three passes now use Set membership tests, making parsing linear in the number of indexes. There is no behaviour change: parsing is byte-identical on a differential corpus of 8413 selectors. ### Workarounds Cap the size of selectors accepted from untrusted sources before parsing.

References

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