Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability in the CSS scrubber in rrrene html_sanitize_ex allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to exhaust server CPU via a long CSS declaration in sanitized HTML. The declaration regex in HtmlSanitizeEx.Scrubber.CSS.scrub/1 matches the property name with an unbounded greedy [-\w]+ followed by a mandatory :, so a long run of word characters not followed by a colon makes the engine give back one character at a time and retry the colon at every start offset. The work is quadratic in the length of the run, and no length cap is applied to the CSS handed to the scrubber. An 80 KB <style> body costs roughly 2.4 seconds of scheduler time, so a few concurrent requests saturate the BEAM scheduler pool and make the application unresponsive.
The impact is CPU exhaustion only. Nothing is read, modified or disclosed.
This issue affects html_sanitize_ex: from 0.3.1 before 1.5.3.
References
| Link | Resource |
|---|---|
| https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-68749.html | Patch Third Party Advisory |
| https://github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/commit/4f4bd9eb254881462c0461fbab74b29188c2c133 | Patch |
| https://github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/security/advisories/GHSA-4cx2-987x-rr2x | Broken Link |
| https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-68749 | Patch Third Party Advisory |
Configurations
History
11 Aug 2026, 13:44
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| CVSS |
v2 : v3 : |
v2 : unknown
v3 : 7.5 |
| First Time |
Rrrene
Rrrene htmlsanitizeex |
|
| CPE | cpe:2.3:a:rrrene:htmlsanitizeex:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | |
| References | () https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-68749.html - Patch, Third Party Advisory | |
| References | () https://github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/commit/4f4bd9eb254881462c0461fbab74b29188c2c133 - Patch | |
| References | () https://github.com/rrrene/html_sanitize_ex/security/advisories/GHSA-4cx2-987x-rr2x - Broken Link | |
| References | () https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-68749 - Patch, Third Party Advisory |
06 Aug 2026, 16:16
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| New CVE |
Information
Published : 2026-08-06 16:16
Updated : 2026-08-11 13:44
NVD link : CVE-2026-68749
Mitre link : CVE-2026-68749
CVE.ORG link : CVE-2026-68749
JSON object : View
Products Affected
rrrene
- htmlsanitizeex
CWE
CWE-1333
Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
