{"id":"CVE-2026-4671","aliases":["GHSA-r8cj-3554-33mr"],"title":"justhtml introduces denial-of-service hardening","summary":"justhtml introduces denial-of-service hardening","severity":"low","vendor":"justhtml","product":"justhtml","ecosystem":"pip","affected":["justhtml < 1.18.0"],"patched":["justhtml 1.18.0"],"published":"2026-05-08","updated":"2026-08-24","source":"OSV","sourceUrl":"https://osv.dev/vulnerability/GHSA-r8cj-3554-33mr","references":[{"url":"https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/security/advisories/GHSA-r8cj-3554-33mr"},{"url":"https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml"}],"tags":["osv","pip"],"epss":0.00372,"epssPercentile":0.31114,"ingestedAt":"2026-08-24T19:25:44.327Z","slug":"CVE-2026-4671","body":"## Overview\n\n## Summary\n\n`justhtml` `1.18.0` fixes multiple low-severity denial-of-service hardening issues in CSS selector handling and linkification.\n\nThese issues are availability concerns. They do not allow script execution, data disclosure, or sanitizer bypass by themselves.\n\n## Affected versions\n\n- `justhtml` `< 1.18.0`\n\n## Fixed version\n\n- `justhtml` `1.18.0` released on May 4, 2026\n\n## Impact\n\n### CSS selector handling\n\nApplications that evaluate attacker-controlled selector strings, or that run selector-based transform pipelines over attacker-controlled documents, could consume disproportionate CPU or memory.\n\nThe affected selector patterns included oversized selectors, large selector lists, oversized compound selectors, long combinator chains, deeply nested functional pseudo-classes such as `:not(...)`, repeated attribute/class token matching over large values, repeated sibling or ancestor scans, repeated positional pseudo-class work, and `:contains(...)` over large descendant text.\n\nProgrammatically constructed malformed DOM graphs could also trigger non-terminating or duplicate traversal in some selector paths, including cyclic/shared child graphs, cyclic parent chains, and cyclic text traversal for `:contains(...)`.\n\n### Linkification\n\nAttacker-controlled text containing punctuation-heavy input or URL candidates ending in long runs of unmatched closing brackets could cause repeated rescanning and consume disproportionate CPU when linkification was enabled.\n\n## Default configuration\n\nOrdinary sanitization of parsed HTML with the default `JustHTML(..., sanitize=True)` configuration is not expected to expose untrusted users to selector injection, because selectors are normally supplied by application code.\n\nThe main risk areas are:\n\n- applications that accept selector strings from untrusted users and pass them to `query(...)`, `matches(...)`, or selector-based transforms\n- custom transform or sanitization pipelines that run selector matching over very large untrusted documents\n- applications that construct or mutate DOM trees programmatically from untrusted structure\n- applications that enable `Linkify(...)` over attacker-controlled text\n\n## Fixes in 1.18.0\n\n`1.18.0` adds generalized selector resource controls and removes several repeated-work hot paths:\n\n- shared selector limits for parse and match operations\n- structural caps for selector length, selector lists, compound selectors, complex selectors, and parse depth\n- match-operation and string-byte budgets\n- per-query matcher state for caches and cycle guards\n- precomputed or cached ancestor, sibling, positional, attribute-token, text-content, `:not(...)`, `:empty`, and `:nth-child(...)` work\n- consistent enforcement across public parsing, `query(...)`, tag-only query fast paths, transform selector compilation, and sanitization transform matching\n- linkification hardening for punctuation-heavy inputs and trailing bracket trimming\n\n## CWE mapping\n\n- CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption\n- CWE-407: Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity\n- CWE-835: Loop with Unreachable Exit Condition\n\n## Recommended action\n\nUpgrade to `justhtml` `1.18.0`.\n\nIf users cannot upgrade immediately:\n\n- do not pass untrusted selector strings to `query(...)`, `matches(...)`, or selector-based transforms\n- restrict the size of untrusted documents before selector matching or linkification\n- avoid constructing programmatic DOM graphs from untrusted structure\n- avoid enabling `Linkify(...)` on very large attacker-controlled text\n\n## Credit\n\nDiscovered during an internal security review of `justhtml`.\n\n## Affected packages\n\n- `justhtml < 1.18.0`\n\n## Remediation\n\nUpgrade to a patched release:\n\n- `justhtml 1.18.0`","depth":"sunlit","depthScore":14,"depthScoreParts":{"impact":13.8,"likelihood":0.1,"exploitation":0,"ransomware":0},"changes":[]}