CVE-2026-68749

HIGH CVSS 4.0: 8.2 EPSS 0.44%
Updated Aug 19, 2026
Rrrene
Parameter Value
CVSS 8.2 (HIGH)
Affected Versions 0.3.1 — 1.5.3
Fixed In 1.5.3
Type CWE-1333 (Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity / ReDoS)
Vendor Rrrene
Public PoC No

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability in the CSS scrubber in rrrene html_sanitize_ex allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust server CPU via a long CSS declaration in sanitized HTML. The declaration regex in HtmlSanitizeEx.Scrubber.CSS.scrub/1 matches the property name with an unbounded greedy [-\w]+ followed by a mandatory :, so a long run of word characters not followed by a colon makes the engine give back one character at a time and retry the colon at every start offset. The work is quadratic in the length of the run, and no length cap is applied to the CSS handed to the scrubber.

An 80 KB <style> body costs roughly 2.4 seconds of scheduler time, so a few concurrent requests saturate the BEAM scheduler pool and make the application unresponsive. The impact is CPU exhaustion only. Nothing is read, modified or disclosed.

This issue affects html_sanitize_ex: from 0.3.1 before 1.4.5 and from 1.5.0-rc.0 before 1.5.3.

Attack Parameters

Attack Vector
Network
Can be exploited remotely
Attack Complexity
Low
Easy to exploit
Attack Requirements
Present
Additional conditions required
Privileges Required
None
No privileges needed
User Interaction
None
No user interaction needed

Impact Assessment

Confidentiality
None
No data leak
Integrity
None
No data modification
Availability
High
Complete denial of service

CVSS Vector v4.0

Vulnerable Products 1

Configuration From (including) Up to (excluding)
Rrrene Htmlsanitizeex
cpe:2.3:a:rrrene:htmlsanitizeex:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
0.3.1 1.5.3