CVE-2026-87079
Public on 2026-09-22
Modified on 2026-09-23
Description
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.
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.
Severity
See what this means
CVSS v3 Base Score
See breakdown
Affected Packages
| Platform | Package | Release Date | Advisory | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Linux 2023 | perl-Net-IDN-Encode | Pending Fix | ||
| Amazon Linux 2027 Preview | perl-Net-IDN-Encode | Pending Fix |
CVSS Scores
| Score Type | Score | Vector | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Linux | CVSSv3 | 7.5 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H |