CVE-2026-14895CWE-1333

String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service

High · published July 7, 2026

CVSS v3.1
7.5
EPSS
1%
Percentile
49.5
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service.

The trim and rtrim functions stripped trailing whitespace with s/\s*$//u. Because \s* matches greedily and the $ anchor fails whenever a non-whitespace character follows the whitespace, the regex engine retries the match at each offset of a long whitespace run, producing quadratic backtracking. The fix replaces \s*$ with \s+$.

Any caller that passes untrusted input to trim or rtrim can trigger CPU exhaustion with a string containing a long run of whitespace.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
7.5 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00630 · 49.5th percentile
Weakness
CWE-1333 · Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
Published
2026-07-07T22:12Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 07 JUL 22:12Z
    String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service
    cvelistv5