CVE-2026-87079High· 7.5▾ TwilightNet::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic insertion cost when decoding a long label in decode_punycode. The XS backend inserts each decoded code point into a UTF-8 buffer and finds the insertio…
▾ Twilight zone — High severity, or a signal on a lesser flaw
impact 41.3 · likelihood 0.1 · exploitation 0
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Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization from CISA's ADP record at CVE.org: whether exploitation is observed, whether an attack can be automated, and how much of the system is at stake.
Exploit-prediction probability, daily snapshots since Sep 23.
Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.
Disclosed via NVD
— → 7.5
none → high
0.2%
0.2% → 0.6%
Net::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic insertion cost when decoding a long label in decode_punycode.
The XS backend inserts each decoded code point into a UTF-8 buffer and finds the insertion point by scanning that buffer from the start, one character at a time. The scan runs once per code point over the output built so far, so the cost is quadratic in the label length. The pure-Perl backend downgrades its input to bytes so that substr can index it directly, but takes its working copy before the downgrade, so when the input carries the UTF-8 flag every substr on the copy scans from the start, with the same quadratic cost.
Nothing bounds the label length in the to-Unicode direction. The 63-byte DNS limit is checked only when converting to ASCII, so domain_to_unicode and uts46_to_unicode pass an attacker-supplied label of any length to the decoder.
Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.
Field changes observed since this record was first indexed.
Connected by shared product, vendor, weakness, or advisory.
CVE-2026-87081High· 7.5Net::IDN::UTS46 versions before 2.590 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic punycode encoding of an overlong label before the length check in to_ascii. to_ascii punycode encodes each label and only then applies the 63-byte DNS lim…
CVE-2026-74765Medium· 6.5Net::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl allow an out-of-bounds read via integer overflow of the delta accumulator in encode_punycode. The XS backend keeps the punycode delta, and the digit index derived from it, in a signed in…
CVE-2026-74766High· 8.4Net::IDN::Punycode versions from 2.301 before 2.590 for Perl allow a heap use-after-free via a decoded code point that reallocates the output buffer in decode_punycode. The XS backend inserts each decoded code point into the string buff…
CVE-2026-87078Critical· 9.1Net::IDN::Punycode versions from 2.302 before 2.590 for Perl leak the output buffer on every rejected label in decode_punycode. The XS backend allocates the scalar it returns before it validates the input, sizing the buffer at twice the…
CVE-2026-87080Critical· 9.1Net::IDN::Punycode::PP versions before 2.590 for Perl decode a truncated label to a name containing a character it never encoded in decode_punycode. The pure-Perl decoder reads one digit at a time with four-argument substr and tests the…
CVE-2026-87082High· 7.5Net::IDN::Punycode versions before 2.590 for Perl hang, crash or return a wrong label via unvalidated malformed UTF-8 in encode_punycode. Neither backend checks that its input is well-formed UTF-8, so a string with the UTF-8 flag set ov…