What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-14895: String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-07 · updated 2026-10-25
• Weakness: CWE-1333

Description

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 products

• BAKERSCOT String::Util: before 1.36 — fixed in 1.36

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: BAKERSCOT String::Util 1.36. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/scottchiefbaker/String-Util/commit/f8150867aaeb8f57c59601aefb2193f2caed8745.patch
• https://github.com/scottchiefbaker/String-Util/releases
• https://metacpan.org/release/BAKERSCOT/String-Util-1.36/diff/BAKERSCOT/String-Util-1.35#lib/String/Util.pm
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/07/07/18

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