String::Util versions before 1.36 for Perl are susceptible to a regular expression denial of service
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.5epss 0.4%
exploitation probability
0.4%top 68% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
BAKERSCOT · String::UtilReferences
https://github.com/scottchiefbaker/String-Util/commit/f8150867aaeb8f57c59601aefb2193f2caed8745.patchhttps://github.com/scottchiefbaker/String-Util/releaseshttps://metacpan.org/release/BAKERSCOT/String-Util-1.36/diff/BAKERSCOT/String-Util-1.35#lib/String/Util.pmhttp://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/07/07/18