CVE-2026-49476

Soup Sieve is a CSS selector library designed to be used with Beautiful Soup 4. Prior to 2.8.4, the CSS selector parser in soupsieve allocates unbounded memory when compiling large comma-separated selector lists, allowing an attacker who can supply a crafted selector string to soupsieve.compile() or Beautiful Soup .select() / .select_one() to allocate hundreds of megabytes of heap memory from a relatively small input and cause denial of service. This issue is fixed in version 2.8.4.

Weakness

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:

• The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.

• The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/147.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/227.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/492.html

References

• https://github.com/facelessuser/soupsieve/commit/28108ab805818c832d9568142a99844fd95a0d39
• https://github.com/facelessuser/soupsieve/releases/tag/2.8.4
• https://github.com/facelessuser/soupsieve/security/advisories/GHSA-2wc2-fm75-p42x
• https://github.com/facelessuser/soupsieve/security/advisories/GHSA-2wc2-fm75-p42x