Description
Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.9, selector_iter in src/soupsieve/css_parser.py trims the raw selector with RE_WS_END, an end-anchored WSC whitespace-and-comment expression used with search(), so the regular expression engine retries a greedy scan at every starting offset. An attacker-controlled valid selector containing a long internal whitespace run, or a selector containing a long CSS comment run followed by another token, causes quadratic CPU work before tokenization. User-controlled selectors can reach the path through soupsieve.compile() and BeautifulSoup.select(), while applications using only hard-coded selectors are unaffected. This root cause is separate from the IDENTIFIER and VALUE backtracking vulnerability because the cost occurs in RE_WS_END.search during trimming rather than token matching. The resulting CPU consumption can hold the Python GIL, exhaust workers, and stall a service without causing memory corruption or code execution. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.
References3
Metrics
- CVSS 3.1
-
5.3
MEDIUM
Score source: CNA
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L - EPSS — exploit probability
- 1% percentile: 49 · as of 8 November 2026
- CWE
- CWE-400CWE-1333
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