CVE-2026-83606: xmldom PI grammar regex ReDoS: quadratic backtracking on unterminated processing instructions
@xmldom/xmldom’s processing-instruction (PI) grammar regex exhibits quadratic-time backtracking
(ReDoS) when parsing an unterminated processing instruction. A single small XML document
containing <? + a target + a long run of whitespace and no closing ?> forces the regular
expression engine into O(n²) work, stalling the Node.js event loop. The input is parsed with
DOMParser.parseFromString under default options, so it is reachable from unauthenticated,
network-delivered XML (SOAP/SAML, webhooks, uploads, XML APIs).
References
Code Behaviors & Features
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