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VulnerabilityPublished

CVE-2026-126190: Soup Sieve · Polynomial-time denial of service in the descendant combinator

Affects pyspellingSource GCVE Database

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Authoritative record:CVE-2026-126190· High 7.5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 7.5 High · fixed in 4.0 : patch pyspelling soon.

Data as of 13 Nov 2026, 21:32 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score
7.5High
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

Thin evidence

One scorer or none
CVSS scores by source
CNA (GitHub_M)CVSS 3.17.5
Patch
Available – fixed in 4.0
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 12 Nov 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: 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 13 Nov 2026.

What to do

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
Homebrewpyspellingpkg:brew/pyspellingOther threatsAffected
  • >=2.9
Fixed in–

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

AI-suggested

Upgrade to Soup Sieve version 4.0 or later, where the vulnerability is fixed by caching match results to ensure linear-time selector matching. No code changes are needed beyond upgrading. Avoid using the NOCACHE flag, as it disables caching and reintroduces the vulnerability. If upgrading is not possible, reduce the number of descendant combinators in selectors, limit the size and nesting depth of untrusted documents before processing, and consider running selector matching with time limits or in isolated worker processes that can be terminated if they exceed expected processing time.

Description

CVE-2026-126190 is a polynomial-time denial of service vulnerability in Soup Sieve's handling of CSS descendant combinators. Matching selectors with descendant combinators against deeply nested documents causes CPU time to grow polynomially with nesting depth, allowing attackers controlling input HTML/XML to cause significant processing delays. The issue is fixed in Soup Sieve 4.0 by caching intermediate results to reduce complexity to linear time. Applications processing untrusted markup with descendant combinators in selectors are affected, while those using only trusted documents are not.

References

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