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High · 7.5 CVE-2026-115822 EUVD-2026-109559GHSA-2826-qw6w-9h42

Starman versions before 0.4019 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic regex backtracking when parsing chunked request bodies

Published Oct 25, 2026 · Updated Nov 2, 2026 · Assigned by CPANSec

Description

Starman versions before 0.4019 for Perl allow CPU exhaustion via quadratic regex backtracking when parsing chunked request bodies.

Starman decodes chunked request bodies before calling the application, matching each chunk-size line with `s/^(([0-9a-fA-F]+).*\015\012)//`. A line of hex digits followed by a bare LF and then CRLF never matches, because `.` does not match LF, and each failed attempt backtracks in time quadratic in the length of the hex run. Nothing limits the length of the line.

A remote attacker can exhaust worker CPU by sending such requests to any route.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
— Starman < 0.4019 0.4019

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 starman 0.4019-1 —
Debian 13 starman No fix yet —
Debian 12 starman No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 starman No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS starman No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS starman No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS starman No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS starman No fix yet —
Show 2 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS starman No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS starman No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Tumbleweed perl-Starman 0.4019-1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:12276-1

Advisories 1

References