Starlet versions from 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via regular expression backtracking when decoding chunked request bodies
Impact
Starlet versions 0.20 before 0.33 for Perl are vulnerable to CPU exhaustion via regular expression backtracking when decoding chunked request bodies, allowing a remote attacker to occupy a worker for about a minute of CPU time. The weakness is due to inefficient regular expression complexity. A remote attacker can exploit this weakness.
Summarized by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast. Verify details against the original sources.What to do
Upgrade to Starlet 0.33 or later.
Affected packages
Affected products
Vendor version evidence. Product records are separate from automatic dependency matching.
Vendor not supplied · CPANSec
Starlet
1 range
Vendor not supplied · CPANSec
Starlet
Package identity
pkg:cpan/StarletIdentity supplied by CPANSec. Version matching requires compatible range evidence.
Compare with this publisher’s ranges. This does not inspect your installation.
affected
0.20 → before 0.33
custom versions
Other versions: unaffected
Original source description
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.
Inside the record
Evidence available
Describes the evidence in this view, not whether the product is safe.
Original records
CVE-2026-115866View the latest unmodified CVE JSON from the official source. It may be newer than this imported page.
cve.new JSON →Contributing organizations · 1
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What changed
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