CVE-2026-115866

starlet: Starlet versions from 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via regular expression backtracking when decodin...

CVE-2026-115866 is fixed in 2 products on 1 platform, first by DEBIAN-CVE-2026-115866, released November 3, 2026. It is not reported as exploited. Patch Radar priority: High.

High
CVSS
7.5
high
Exploitation
None reported
No vendor assessment
CISA KEV
Not listed
Not in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
EPSS
0.0038
32nd percentile

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.

Where it's fixed

ProductFixed inFixReleased
Linux
perl-Starlet · Fedora 43 0.33-1.fc43 FEDORA-2026-092670EC3E Nov 10, 2026
starlet · Debian 14 0.33-1 DEBIAN-CVE-2026-115866 Nov 3, 2026

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