Vulnerability Details CVE-2026-66046
Expat through 2.8.3 contains a denial of service vulnerability caused by quadratic algorithmic complexity in the storeAtts() function in xmlparse.c, where processing N specified attributes with non-normalized values triggers an O(N^2) linear scan of elementType->defaultAtts to determine CDATA status. A remote unauthenticated attacker can supply a single well-formed XML document of a few megabytes to an application parsing untrusted XML to cause excessive CPU consumption, resulting in denial of service without requiring authentication, external entity resolution, or non-default parser options.
Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score
EPSS Score 0.006
EPSS Ranking 46.2%
CVSS Severity
CVSS v3 Score 7.5