CVE-2026-87081
Medium
Elevated severity or exploit probability.
CVSS base
7.5
HIGH
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)
0.6%
48.0th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness / dates
CWE-407
Published 2026-09-22 · modified 2026-09-22
Description
Net::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 limit. encode_punycode in both backends follows the sample implementation in RFC 3492, whose outer loop runs once per distinct non-ASCII code point and scans the whole input each round, so a label of distinct non-ASCII characters costs the square of its length before the limit rejects it. Every ASCII conversion in the distribution, including domain_to_ascii and email_to_ascii, goes through to_ascii.
References
- https://github.com/robrwo/Net-IDN-Encode/commit/5ac3315131264670efcd3a29857b651506dfee8e.patch
- https://github.com/robrwo/Net-IDN-Encode/commit/ea34f812d7dc67f3b211f4d92e74c6a7e24d764a.patch
- https://metacpan.org/release/PJCJ/Net-IDN-Encode-2.590-TRIAL/changes
- http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/09/22/16