CVE-2026-14895

Summary

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.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
BAKERSCOTString::Util0 < 1.36affected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-1333: CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

Workarounds

For deployments that cannot upgrade, enforce a maximum length on strings before passing them to the trim and rtrim functions.

Note that the HTML form field maxlength attribute is only enforced client-side.

ADP Enrichment

CVE Program Container

Additional References

References