High · published September 22, 2026
Net::IDN::UTS46 versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic punycode encoding of an overlong label before the length check in to_ascii.
to_ascii punycode encodes each label and only then applies the 63-byte DNS limit. encode_punycode in both backends follows the sample implementation in RFC 3492, whose outer loop runs once per distinct non-ASCII code point and scans the whole input each round, so a label of distinct non-ASCII characters costs the square of its length before the limit rejects it. Every ASCII conversion in the distribution, including domain_to_ascii and email_to_ascii, goes through to_ascii.