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VulnerabilityPublished Updated

CVE-2026-115866: Starlet versions from 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via regular expression

Affects starletSource GCVE Database

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Authoritative record:CVE-2026-115866· High

Not known to be exploited.

Data as of 5 Nov 2026, 12:35 UTC

Severity
High

Rated by Threat Radar · CVSS not yet scored by NVD

Thin evidence

One scorer or none

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 30 Oct 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 5 Nov 2026.

What to do

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
Ubuntu 26.10starletpkg:deb/ubuntu/starlet?arch=source&distro=stonkingOther threatsAffected
  • =0.31-2build1
  • =0.31-3
  • =0.32-1
Fixed in–
Ubuntu 26.04 LTSstarletpkg:deb/ubuntu/starlet?arch=source&distro=resoluteOther threatsAffected
  • =0.31-2
  • =0.31-2build1
Fixed in–
Ubuntu 24.04 LTSstarletpkg:deb/ubuntu/starlet?arch=source&distro=nobleOther threatsAffected
  • =0.31-2
Fixed in–
Ubuntu 22.04 LTSstarletpkg:deb/ubuntu/starlet?arch=source&distro=jammyOther threatsAffected
  • =0.31-1.1
Fixed in–
Ubuntu 20.04 LTSstarletpkg:deb/ubuntu/starlet?arch=source&distro=focalOther threatsAffected
  • =0.31-1
Fixed in–
Ubuntu 18.04 LTSstarletpkg:deb/ubuntu/starlet?arch=source&distro=bionicOther threatsAffected
  • =0.31-1
Fixed in–

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

Description

Starlet versions from 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via regular expression backtracking when decoding chunked request bodies. A chunk-size line is matched as a run of hex digits, then .* and a CRLF. A run followed by a bare LF and then a CRLF can never match, and the engine retries the match once for each digit, so the time taken grows with the square of the run length. Nothing limits the length of the run, which can span several reads. A remote attacker can occupy a worker for about a minute of CPU time with one 128 KiB request, before the application is called.

References

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